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ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 



- 

W. D. H 



BY 

W. D. HO WELLS, 

t i 
AUTHOR OF " SUBURBAN SKETCHES," "VENETIAN LIFE," ETC. 



NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION. 




BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 

Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 

1874. 



V 



IK 



* 



& 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by 

W. D. Howells, 

in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington 



By twnsf ei 

APR 6 1915 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BT 

H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



ITALIAN JOUKNEYS. 



CONTENTS. 

♦ 

PAGE 

The Road to Rome from Venice : 

I. Leaving Venice 9 

II. From Padua to Ferkara 10 

III. The Picturesque, the Improbable, and the Pathetic 

in Ferrara 14 

IV. Through Bologna to Genoa 43 

V Up and Down Genoa 52 

VI. By Sea from Genoa to Naples . . . . . 65 

VII. Certain Things in Naples 75 

VIII. A Day in Pompeii ...-."... 89 
IX, A Half hour at Herculaneum .... 106 

X. Capri and Capriotes 116 

XI. The Protestant Ragged Schools at Naplks . . 136 

XII. Between Rome and Naples . . . . . . 147 

XIII. Roman Pearls 151 

Forza Maggiore 178 

At Padua 196 

A Pilgrimage to Petrarch's House at Arqua . . - 216 

A Visit to the Cimbri ........ 235 

Minor Travels : 

I. Pisa 251 

II. The Ferrara Road 259 

III. Trieste 264 

IV. Bassano 274 

V. Possagno, Camova's Birthplace .... 280 

VI. Como ......... 285 

Stopping at Vicenza, Verona, and Parma . . 293 

Ducal Mantua 321 




THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE; 



I. 



LEAVING VENICE. 



We did not know, when we started from home 113 
Venice, on the 8th of November, 1864, that we had 
taken the longest road to Rome. We thought that 
of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that 
leading to Padua, and thence through Ferrara and 
Bologna to Florence, and so down the sea-shore from 
Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, 
and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that 
this path, so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead 
us to Genoa, conduct us on shipboard, toss us four 
dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void, bat- 
tered, and bewildered, in Naples ? Luckily, 

" The moving accident is not my trade/' 

for there are events of this journey (now happily at 
an end) which, if I recounted them with unsparing 
sincerity, would forever deter the reader from taking 
any road to Rome. 

Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when 
you come to it ? 





V 



\ 



II. 



FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. 

As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of devia- 
tion from the direct line in our road, and the com- 
pany was well enough. We had a Swiss family in 
the car with us to Padua, and they told us how they 
were going home to their mountains from Russia, 
where they had spent nineteen years of their lives. 
They were mother and father and only daughter, 
and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral 
country, was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, 
that she filled the morning twilight with vague im- 
ages of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet, and 
whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and 
print about Switzerland. Of course, as the light 
grew brighter these images melted away, and left 
only a little frost upon the window-pane. 

The mother was restively anxious at nearing her 
country, and told us every thing of its loveliness and 
happiness. Nineteen years of absence had not robbed 
it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it 
again took nothing from it. We said how glad we 
should be if we were as near America as she was to 
Switzerland. "America ! " she screamed; " you 
come from America ! Dear God, the world is wide 



FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. 11 

— the world is wide ! " The thought was so paralyz- 
ing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, 
and gave her husband time to express his sympathy 
with us in our war, which he understood perfectly 
well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate 
slavery must fail, and he hoped that tke war would 
soon end, for it made cotton very dear. 

Europe is material : I doubt if, after Victor Hugo 
and Garibaldi, there were many upon that continent 
whose enthusiasm for American unity (which is Eu- 
ropean freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the ex- 
pensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled 
in price, and every man in Europe paid tribute in 
hard money to the devotion with which we prose- 
cuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the cul- 
tivation of cotton. 

We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted 
at Padua, where we w T ere to take the diligence for 
the Po. In the diligence their loss was more than 
made good by the company of the only honest man 
in Italy. Of course this honest man had been a 
great sufferer from his own countrymen, and I wish 
that all English and American tourists, who think 
themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and 
deceit in Italy, could have heard our honest man's 
talk. The truth is, these ingenious people prey upon 
their own kind with an avidity quite as keen as that 
with which they devour strangers ; and I am half- 
persuaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares better 
among them than a traveller of their own nation. 
Italians will always pretend, on any occasion, that 



12 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

you have been plundered much worse than they , 
but the reverse often happens. They give little in 
fees ; but their landlord, their porter, their driver, 
and their boatman pillage them with the same im- 
punity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest 
man in the diligence, he had suffered such enormities 
at the hands of the Paduans, from which we had just 
escaped, and at the hands of the Farrarese, into 
which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles 
scant an hour), that I was almost minded to stop be- 
tween the nests of those brigands and pass the rest 
of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man lived. 
His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to 
illustrate the strong municipal spirit which still dom- 
inates all Italy, and which is more inimical to an 
effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser 
has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a 
foreigner at Padua, twenty-five miles north, and a 
foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles south ; and 
throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in 
another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an 
American with people who consider every stranger 
as sent them by the bounty of Providence to be 
eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man 
had paid at his hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the 
other week he had been made to give five francs 
apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to 
the waiter ; and he pathetically warned us to beware 
how we dealt with Italians. Indeed, I never met a 
man so thoroughly persuaded of the rascality of his 
nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took 



FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. 13 

snuff with his whole person ; and he volunteered, at 
sight of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the 
reader : Stuff a goose with sausage ; let it hang in 
the weather during the winter ; and in the spring cut 
it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and 
delicate soup. 

But after all our friend's talk, though constant, 
became dispiriting, and we were willing when he left 
us. His integrity had, indeed, been so oppressive 
that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our 
dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more 
cheerfully on to Ferrara. 



III. 



THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE 
PATHETIC IN FERRARA. 

1. 

It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than 
any real interest in the poet, which led me to visit 
the prison of Tasso on the night of our arrival, which 
was mild and moonlit. The portier at the Stella 
d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows 
which it is sometimes difficult to respect, and I went 
and paid this homage in the coal-cellar in which was 
never imprisoned the poet whose works I had not 
read. 

The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso 
was confined for seven years, is still an asylum for 
the infirm and sick, but it is no longer used as a 
mad-house. It stands on one of the long, silent 
Ferrarese streets, not far from the Ducal Castle, and 
it is said that from the window of his cell the un- 
happy poet could behold Leonora in her tower. It 
may be so ; certainly those who can believe in the 
genuineness of the cell will have no trouble in be- 
lieving that the vision of Tasso could pierce through 
several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at last 
comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. 



FERRARA. 15 

We entered a modern gateway, and passed into a 
hall of the elder edifice, where a slim young soldier 
sat reading a romance of Dumas. This was the 
keeper of Tasso's prison ; and knowing me, by the 
instinct which teaches an Italian custodian to dis- 
tinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True and 
Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a 
waxen taper, unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic 
clang, and preceded me to the cell of Tasso. We 
descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in a 
sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in 
the poet's time, and was then a garden planted with 
trees and flowers. On a low doorway to the right 
was inscribed the legend " Prigione di Tasso," 
and passing through this doorway into a kind of re- 
ception-cell, we entered the poet's dungeon. It is an 
oblong room, with a low wagon-roof ceiling, under 
which it is barely possible to stand upright. A sin- 
gle narrow window admits the light, and the stone 
casing of this window has a hollow in a certain place, 
which might well have been worn there by the 
friction of the hand that for seven years passed the 
prisoner his food through the small opening. The 
young custodian pointed to this memento of suffer- 
ing, without effusion, and he drew my attention to 
other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling 
himself to palliate their improbability in the least. 
They were his stock in trade ; you paid your money, 
and took your choice of believing in them or not. 
On the other hand, my p or 'tier, an ex-valet de place, 
pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm, 



16 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

and expressed the freshest delight in the inspection 
of each object of interest. 

One still faintly discerns among the vast number of 
names with which the walls of the ante-cell are be- 
written, that of Lamartine. The name of Byron, 
which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had 
been scooped away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany 
(so the custodian said), and there is only part of a 
capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still 
fragrant of associations with the noble bard, who, 
according to the story related to Valery, caused him- 
self to be locked up in it, and there, with his head 
fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting his brow, 
spent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. 
It is a touching picture ; but its pathos becomes some- 
what embarrassing when you enter the cell, and see 
the impossibility of taking more than three generous 
paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, 
after this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) 
to the custodian : " I thank thee, good man ! The 
thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind and heart." 
"A short time after his departure from Ferrara," adds 
the Frenchman, maliciously, " he composed his ' La- 
ment of Tasso,' a mediocre result from such inspira- 
tion." No doubt all this is colored, for the same 
author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity 
of the spectacle : he declares that Byron spent part 
of his time in the cell in writing upon the ceiling 
Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he misspelled. 
The present visitor has no means of judging of the 
truth concerning this, for the lines of the poet have 



FERRARA. 17 

been so smoked by the candles of successive pil- 
grims in their efforts to get light on them, that they 
are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what 
were Byron's emotions on visiting the prison of 
Tasso, there is no doubt about Lady Morgan's : she 
" experienced a suffocating emotion ; her heart failed 
her on entering that cell ; and she satisfied a mel- 
ancholy curiosity at the cost of a most painful sen- 
sation." 

I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of 
her ladyship's own language, in a clever guide-book 
called II Servitore di Piazza, which I bought at Fer- 
rara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt all I 
know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. 
The Count Avventi, who writes this book, prefaces 
it by saying that he is a valet de place who knows 
how to read and write, and he employs these unusual 
gifts with singular candor and clearness. No one, he 
says, before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed of 
calling the cellar in question Tasso's prison, and it 
was never before that time made the shrine of sen- 
timental pilgrimage, though it has since been visited 
by every traveller who has passed through Ferrara. 
It was used during the poet's time to hold charcoal 
and lime ; and not long ago died an old servant of 
the hospital, who remembered its use for that pur- 
pose. It is damp, close, and dark, and Count Av- 
venti thinks it hardly possible that a delicate courtier 
could have lived seven years in a place unwholesome 
enough to kill a stout laborer in two months; while 
it seems to him not probable that Tasso should have 
2 



18 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

received there the visits of princes and other dis- 
tinguished persons whom Duke Alfonso allowed to 
see him, or that a prisoner who was often permitted 
to ride about the city in a carriage should have been 
thrust back into such a cavern on his return to the 
hospital. "After this," says our valet de place who 
knows how to read and write, " visit the prison of 
Tasso, certain that in the hospital of St, Anna that 
great man was confined for many years ; " and, with 
this chilly warning, leaves his reader to his emotions. 
I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered 
in regard to other memorable places, the objects of 
interest in Italy would dwindle sadly in number, and 
the valets de place, whether they know how to read 
and write or not, would be starved to death. Even 
the learning of Italy is poetic ; and an Italian would 
rather enjoy a fiction than know a fact — ill which 
preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise. 
But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's 
progress throughout the whole land with fanciful im- 
probabilities ; so that if one use his eyes half as much 
as his wonder, he must see how much better it would 
have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an in- 
terest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can 
make out of the most famous place is, that it is pos- 
sibly what it is said to be, and is more probably as 
near that as any thing local enterprise could furnish. 
He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, 
and has the satisfaction of knowing that it was the 
charcoal-cellar of the hospital in which the poet 
dwelt. And the genius loci — where is that? Away 



FERRARA. 1 9 

in the American woods, very likely, whispering some 
dreamy, credulous youth, — telling him charming 
fables of its locus, and proposing to itself to abandon 
him as soon as he sets foot upon its native ground* 
You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and 
nothing about his prison, I was heavily disappointed 
in not being able to believe in it, and felt somehow 
that I had been awakened from a cherished dream- 



ii. 



But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow 
of my skepticism upon the reader, and so I tell him 
a story about Ferrara which I actually believe. He 
must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvel- 
ous long and straight. On the corners formed by 
the crossing of two of the longest and straightest of 
these streets stand four palaces, in only one of 
which we have a present interest. This palace my 
guide took me to see, after our visit to Tasso's prison, 
and, standing in its shadow, he related to me the 
occurrence which has given it a sad celebrity. It 
was, in the time of the gifted toxicologist, the resi- 
dence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make poison- 
ous little suppers there, and ask the best families 
of Italy to partake of them. It happened on one 
occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of a 
ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and 
treated with peculiar indignity. She determined to 
make the Venetians repent their unwonted accession 
of virtue, and she therefore allowed the occurrence to 



20 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge 
arrived, when she gave a supper, and invited to her 
board eighteen young and handsome Venetian nobles. 
Upon the preparation of this repast she bestowed all 
the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge ; 
and the result was, the Venetians were so felicitously 
poisoned that they had just time to listen to a speech 
from the charming and ingenious lady of the house 
before expiring. In this address she reminded her 
guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, 
and perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present 
vengeance. She was surprised and pained when 
one of the guests interrupted her, and, justifying 
the treatment she had received at Venice, declared 
himself her natural son. The lady instantly recog- 
nized him, and in the sudden revulsion of maternal 
feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he 
not only refused to do, but continued his dying re- 
proaches, till his mother, losing her self-command, 
drew her poniard and plunged it into his heart. 

The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and 
this being hung out of the window to dry, the wall 
received a stain, which neither the sun nor rain of 
centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only re- 
moved with the masonry, when it became necessary 
to restore the wall under that window, a few months 
before the time of my visit to Ferrara. Accordingly, 
the blood-stain has now disappeared ; but the consci- 
entious artist who painted the new wall has faithfully 
restored the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stucco 
a bloody dash of Venetian red. 



FERARRA. 21 

III. 

It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old 
towns, after having served a certain number of cen- 
turies for the use and pride of men, could be released 
to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would 
like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as 
Mantua, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara, locked up 
quietly within their walls, and left to crumble and 
totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex 
them in their decrepitude than that of some gray 
custodian, who should come to the gate with clank- 
ing keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if he 
gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a 
little while upon the reserved and dignified desola- 
tion. It is a shame to tempt these sad old cities into 
unnatural activity, when they long ago made their 
peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their 
weary brick and mortar with the earth's unbuilded 
dust; and it is hard for the emotional traveller to 
restrain his sense of outrage at finding them inhab- 
ited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, 
and idleness ; at seeing places that would gladly have 
had done with history still doomed to be parts of po- 
litical systems, to read the newspapers, and to expose 
railway guides and caricatures of the Pope and of 
Napoleon in their shop windows. 

Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a liv- 
ing nation against her will, and I therefore marveled 
the more that she had become a portion of the pres- 
ent kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had its 



22 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

daylong before ours; it had been a republic, and 
then subject to lords ; and then, its lords becoming 
dukes, it had led a life of gayety and glory till its 
fall, and given the world such names and memories 
as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from 
making history. Its individual existence ended with 
that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when the Pope de- 
clared it reverted to the Holy See ; and I always 
fancied that it must have received with a spectral, 
yet courtly kind of surprise, those rights of man 
which bloody-handed France distributed to the Ital- 
ian cities in 1796 ; that it must have experienced a 
ghostly bewilderment in its rapid transformation, 
thereafter, under Napoleon, into part of the Cispadan 
Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Repub- 
lic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must 
have sunk back again under the rule of the Popes 
with gratitude and relief at last — as phantoms are 
reputed to be glad when released from haunting the 
world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not 
so much from actual knowledge of facts as from per- 
sonal feeling ; for it seems to me that if I were a 
city' of the past, and must be inhabited at all, I 
should choose just such priestly domination, assured 
that though it consumed my substance, yet it would 
be well for my fame and final repose. I should like to 
feel that my old churches were safe from demolition ; 
that my old convents and monasteries should always 
shelter the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It 
would be pleasant to have studious monks exploring 
quaint corners "of my unphilosophiy,ed annals, and 



FERRARA. 23 

gentle, snuff-taking abbes writing up episodes in the 
history of my noble families, and dedicating them to 
the present heirs of past renown ; while the thinker 
and the reviewer should never penetrate my archives. 
Being myself done with war, I should be glad to 
have my people exempt, as they are under the Pope, 
from military service ; and I should hope that if the 
Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be as so 
many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory 
of perished capitals. Finally, I should trust that in 
the sanctified keeping of the Legates my mortal part 
would rest as sweetly as bones laid in hallowed earth 
brought from Jerusalem ; and that under their serene 
protection I should be forever secure from being in 
any way exhumed and utilized by the ruthless hand 
of Progress. 

However, as I said, this is a mere personal prefer- 
ence, and other old cities might feel differently. In- 
deed, though disposed to condole with Ferrara upon 
the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, 
I could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, 
that she was still almost entirely of the past. She has 
certainly missed that ideal perfection of non-existence 
under the Popes which I have just depicted, but she 
is practically almost as profoundly at rest under the 
King of Italy. One may w T alk long through the 
longitude and rectitude of many of her streets with- 
out the encounter of a single face: the place, as a 
whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii, where 
there are always strangers ; perhaps the only cities in 
the world worthy to compete with Ferrara in point 



24 ITALIAN JOURNF.YS. 

of agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum. 
It is the newer part of the town — the modern quar- 
ter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known 
— which is loneliest ; and whatever motion and 
cheerfulness are still felt in Ferrara linger fondly 
about the ancient holds of life — about the street 
before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and 
narrower streets branching away from the piazza of 
the Duomo, where, on market days, there is a kind 
of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost 
crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with 
an enterprise that contrasted strangely with shop- 
keeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed, surprise at the 
presence of strangers spending two clays in Ferrara 
when they could have got away sooner, was the only 
emotion which the whole population agreed in ex- 
pressing with any degree of energy, but into this 
they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The 
Italians are everywhere an artless race, so far as con- 
cerns the gratification of their curiosity, from which 
no consideration of decency deters them. Here in 
Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their 
eyes, came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us 
at street-corners, and openly and audibly debated 
whether we were English or German. We mio-ht 
have thought this interest a tribute to something pe- 
culiar in our dress or manner, had it not visibly 
attended other strangers who arrived with us. It 
rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more of 
us all, when on the third day the whole city assem- 
bled before our hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of 



FERRARA. 25 

desperate cry, the departure of the heavy-laden om- 
nibus which bore us and our luggage from their 
midst. 

IV. 

I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo 
at Parma, and the Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a 
church more worthy to be seen for its quaint, rich 
architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is 
of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot 
weary, and we continually wandered back to it from 
other more properly interesting objects. It is hor- 
ribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance splendors 
soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last 
Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting 
is muscular and Michelangelic, and the artist's notion 
of putting his friends in heaven and his foes in hell 
is by no means novel ; but he has achieved fame for 
his picture by the original thought of making it his 
revenge for a disappointment in love. The unhappy 
lady who refused his love is represented in the depths, 
in the attitude of supplicating the pity and interest 
of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastia- 
nino, and who consequently has no mercy on her 
that snubbed him. But I counted of far more value 
than this fresco the sincere old sculptures on the 
fagacle of the cathedral, in which the same subject is 
treated, beginning from the moment the archangel's 
trump has sounded. The people getting suddenly 
out of their graves at the summons are all admirable ; 
but the best among them is the excellent man with 



26 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

one leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with 
both hands to pull himself up, while the coffin-lid 
tumbles off behind. One sees instantly that the 
conscience of this early riser is clean, for he makes 
no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few 
thousand years more, with the pretense that it was 
not the trump of doom, but some other and unim- 
portant noise he had heard. The final reward of 
the blessed is expressed by the repose of one small 
figure in the lap of a colossal effigy, which I under- 
stood to mean rest in Abraham's bosom ; but the 
artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling 
upon the fate of the damned, who are all boiling in 
rows of immense pots. It is doubtful (considering 
the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured in the 
one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the 
artist intended the condition of his sinners to be so 
horribly comic as it is ; but the effect is just as great, 
for all that, and the slowest conscience might well 
take alarm from the spectacle of fate so grotesque 
and ludicrous ; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the art- 
ist here punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the 
folly of sinners as well as their wickedness. Boil- 
ing is bad enough ; but to be boiled in an undeniable 
dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame 
as well as agony. 

We -turned from these horrors, and walked down 
by the side of the Duomo toward the Ghetto, which 
is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto to be. 
The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, 
throughout the government of the Dukes, were free 



FERRARA. 27 

to live where they chose in the city ; hut the Pope's 
Legate assigned them afterward a separate quarter, 
which was closed with gates. Large numbers of 
Spanish Jews fled hither during the persecutions, 
and there are four synagogues for the four languages, 
— Spanish, German, French, and Italian. Avventi 
mentions, among other interesting facts concerning 
the Ferrarese Jews, that one of their Rabbins, Isaaco 
degli Abranelli, a man of excellent learning in the 
Scriptures, claimed to be descended from David. 
His children still abide in Ferrara ; and it may have 
been one of his kingly line that kept the tempting 
antiquarian's shop on the corner from which you 
turn up toward the Library. I should think such a 
man would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a 
place : filled with broken and fragmentary glories of 
every kind, it would serve him for that chamber of 
desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental 
Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in ; and, 
indeed, this idea may go far to explain the universal 
Israelitish fondness for dealing in relics and ruins. 



The Ghetto was in itself indifferent to us ; it was 
merely our w T ay to the Library, whither the great 
memory of Ariosto invited us to see his famous relics 
treasured there. 

We found that the dead literati of Ferrara had 
the place wholly to themselves ; not a living soul 
disputed the solitude of the halls with the custodi- 



28 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

ans, and the bust of Ariosto looked down from hia 
monument upon rows of empty tables, idle chairs, 
and dusty inkstands. 

The poet, who was painted by Titian, has a tomb 
of abandoned ugliness, and sleeps under three epi- 
taphs ; while cherubs frescoed on the wall behind 
affect to disclose the mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed 
curtain, but deceive no one who cares to consider 
how impossible it would be for them to perform this 
service, and caper so ignobly as they do at the same 
time. In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with its 
hideousness- and levity. It stood formerly in the 
Church of San Benedetto, where it was erected 
shortly after the poet's death, and it was brought 
to the Library by the French, when they turned the 
church into a barracks for their troops. The poet's 
dust, therefore, rests here, wdiere the worm, work- 
ing silently through the vellum volumes on the 
shelves, feeds upon the immortality of many other 
poets. In the adjoining hall are the famed and 
precious manuscripts of Ariosto and of Tasso. A 
special application must be made to the librarian, in 
order to see the fragment of the Furioso in Ariosto's 
hand, and the manuscript copy of the Gerusalemrna, 
with the corrections by Tasso. There are some 
pages of Ariosto's Satires, framed and glazed for 
the satisfaction of the less curious ; as well as a let- 
ter of Tasso's, written from the Hospital of St. 
Anna, which the poet sends to a friend, with twelve 
shirts, and in which he begs that his friend will have 
the shirts mended, and cautions him " not to let 



tfERRARA. 29 

them be mixed with others." But when the slow 
custodian had at last unlocked that more costly frag- 
ment of the Furioso, and placed it in my hands, the 
other manuscripts had no value for me. It seems to 
me that the one privilege which travel has reserved 
to itself, is that of making each traveller, in presence 
of its treasures, forget whatever other travellers have 
said or written about them. I had read so much of 
Ariosto's industry, and of the proof of it in this man- 
uscript, that I doubted if I should at last marvel at 
it. But the wonder remains with the relic, and I 
paid it my homage devoutly and humbly, and was 
disconcerted afterward to read again in my Valery 
how sensibly all others had felt the preciousness of 
that famous page, which, filled with half a score of 
previous failures, contains in a little open space near 
the margin, the poet's final triumph in a clearly writ- 
ten stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting 
than Ariosto's painful work on these yellow leaves, is 
the grand and simple tribute which another Italian 
poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them : " Vit- 
torio Alfieri beheld and venerated ;" and I think, 
counting over the many memorable tilings I saw on 
the road to Rome and the way home again, this man- 
uscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be 
remembered. 

When at last I turned from it, however, I saw 
that the custodian had another relic of Messer Lodo- 
vico, which he was not ashamed to match with the 
manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one 
of the poet's fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara 



30 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

had picked up from his dust (when it was removed 
from the church to the Library), and neatly bottled 
and labeled. In like manner, they keep a great 
deal of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in 
Italy ; but I found very little savor of poesy hanging 
about this literary relic. 

As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had 
marshaled us the way, we went from the Library to 
the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of a 
long, long street, not far from the railway station. 
There was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat 
nor a dog to be seen in all that long street, at high 
noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, 
and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for 
a posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, 
there is nothing to prevent their assembly, in broad 
daylight, from any part of the neighborhood. There 
was no presence, however, more spiritual than a 
comely country girl to respond to our summons at 
the door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed 
our passage inside. Directly I found the house in- 
habited by living people, I began to be sorry that it 
was not as empty as the Library and the street. In- 
deed, it is much better with Petrarch's house at 
Arqua, w T here the grandeur of the past is never mo- 
lested by the small household joys and troubles of 
the present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less 
tender and fond than the poet's visitors may look 
down from its windows over the slope of vines and 
olives which it crowns ; and it seemed hard, here in 
Ferrara, where the houses are so many and the 



PERRARA. 31 

people are so few, that Ariosto's house could not be 
left to him. Parva sed apta mihi, he has content- 
edly, written upon the front ; but I doubt if he finds 
it large enough for another family, though his modern 
housekeeper reserves him certain rooms for visitors. 
To gain these, you go up to the second story — 
there are but two floors — and cross to the rear of 
the building, where Ariosto's chamber opens out of 
an ante-room, and looks down upon a pinched and 
faded bit of garden.* In this chamber they say the 
poet died. It is oblong, and not large. I should 
think the windows and roof were of the poet's time, 
and that every thing else had been restored ; I am 
quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant 
inventions ; for the poet's burly great arm-chair and 
graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library. 
But the house is otherwise decent and probable ; and 
I do not question but it was in the hall where we en- 
countered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of 
his " Furioso" subject to the corrections and advice 
of his visitors. 

The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been with- 
in a few years restored out of all memory and sem- 
blance of itself; and my wish to see the place in 

* In this garden the poet spent much of his time — chiefly in 
plucking up and transplanting the unlucky shrubbery, which was 
never suffered to grow three months in the same place, — such 
was the poet's rage for revision. It was probably never a very 
large or splendid garden, for the reason that Ariosto gave when 
reproached that he who knew so well how to describe magnificent 
palaces should have built such a poor little house : " It was easier 
to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in his poem cost 
him no money. " 



32 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

which the poet was born and spent his childhood re- 
sulted, after infinite search, in finding a building 
faced newly with stucco and newly French-win- 
dowed. 

Our portier said it was the work of the late Eng- 
lish Vice-Consul, who had bought the house. When 
I complained of the sacrilege, he said : " Yes, it is^ 
true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were 
not one of the noble families of Ferrara." 



VI. 

The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which 
cluster so many sad and splendid memories, stands 
in the heart of the city. I think that the moonlight 
which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its 
massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that sur- 
rounds them, and its four great towers, heavily but- 
tressed, and expanding at the top into bulging cor- 
nices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on 
nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of 
the proper dread charm of feudal times, as this pile 
of gloomy and majestic strength. The daylight took 
nothing of this charm from it ; for the castle stands 
isolated in the midst of the city, as its founder meant 
that it should,* and modern civilization has not 

* The castle of Ferrara was begun in 1885 by Niceolo d'Este, 
to defend himself against the repetition of scenes of tumult, in 
which his princely rights were invaded. One of his tax-gatherers, 
Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself so 
obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they 
rose against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the 



PERRARA. 33 

crossed the castle moat, to undignify its exterior with 
any visible touch of the present. To be sure, when 
you enter it, the magnificent life is gone out of the 
old edifice ; it is no stately halberdier who stands on 
guard at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy 
Italian soldier in baggy trousers. The castle is full 
of public offices, and one sees in its courts and on its 
stairways, not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay squires 
and pages, but whistling messengers going from one 
office to another with docketed papers, and slipshod 
serving-men carrying the clerks their coffee in very 
dirty little pots. Dreary-looking suitors, slowly grind- 
ing through the mills of law, or passing in the routine 
of the offices, are the guests encountered in the cor- 
ridors ; and all that bright-colored throng of the old 
days, ladies and lords, is passed from the scene. The 
'melodrama is over, friends, and now we have a play 
of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral. 

Of course the custodians were slow to admit any 
change of this kind. If you could have believed 
them, — and the poor people told as many lies as they 
could to make you, — you would believe that noth- 
ing had ever happened of a commonplace nature in 

palace of his master, which was immediately assailed. The 
prince's own life was threatened, and he was forced to surrender 
the fugitive to the people, who tore Tortona limb from limb, 
and then, after parading the city with the mutilated remains, 
quietly returned to their allegiance. Niccolo, therefore, caused 
this castle to be built, which he strengthened with massive walls 
and towers commanding the whole city, and rendered inaccessible 
by surrounding it with a deep and wide canal from the river 
Keno. 

3 



34 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

this castle. The taking-off of Hugo and Parisina 
they think the great merit of the castle ; and one of 
them, seeing us, made haste to light his taper and 
conduct us down to the dungeons where those un- 
happy lovers were imprisoned. It is the misfortune 
of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon 
show, just the reverse of those properties which 
should raise horror and distress in the mind of the 
beholder. It was impossible to deny that the cells 
of Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly warm, 
dry, and comfortable ; and we, who had never been 
imprjsoned in them, found it hard to command, for 
our sensation, the terror and agony of the miserable 
ones who suffered there. We, happy and secure in 
these dungeons, could not think of the guilty and 
wretched pair bowing themselves to the headsman's 
stroke in the gloomy chamber under the Hall of 
Aurora; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, 
breaking at last into frantic remorse and tears to know 
that his will had been accomplished. Nay, there 
upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded from 
us ; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian 
tried to kindle it by saying that in the time of the 
event these cells were much dreadfuller than now, 
which was no doubt true. The floors of the dun- 
geons are both below the level of the moat, and the 
narrow windows, or rather crevices to admit the 
light, were cut in the prodigiously thick wall just 
above the water, and were defended with four succes- 
sive iron gratings. The dungeons are some distance 
apart : that of Hugo was separated from the outer 



FERRARA. 35 

wall of the castle by a narrow passage-way, while 
Parisina's window opened directly upon the moat. 

When we ascended again to the court of the 
castle, the custodian, abetted by his wife, would have 
interested us in two memorable wells there, between 
which, he said, Hugo was beheaded ; and unabashed 
by the small success of this fable, he pointed out two 
windows in converging angles overhead, from one of 
which the Marquis, looking into the other, discov- 
ered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now 
walled up, but are neatly represented to the credu- 
lous eye by a fresco of lattices. 

Valery mentions another claim upon the interest 
of the tourist which this castle may make, in the fact 
that it once sheltered John Calvin, who was pro- 
tected by the Marchioness Ren£e, wife of Hercules 
II. ; and my Servitor e di Piazza (the one who knows 
how to read and write) gives the following account 
of the matter, in speaking of the domestic chapel 
which Renee had built in the castle : " This lady 
was learned in belles-lettres and in the schismatic 
doctrines w r hich at that time were insinuating them- 
selves throughout France and Germany, and with 
which Calvin, Luther, and other proselytes, agitated 
the people, and threatened war to the Catholic re- 
ligion. Nationally fond of innovation, and averse to 
the court of Rome on account of the dissensions be- 
tween her father and Pope Julius II., Ren£e began 
to receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she 
maintained correspondence. Indeed, Calvin him- 
self, under the name of Huppeville, visited her in 



36 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her mind 
and seducing her into his own errors, which pro- 
duced discord between her and her religious hus- 
band, and resulted in his placing her in temporary 
seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, 
the chapel is faced with marble, paneled in relief, 
and studied to avoid giving place to saints or images, 
which were disapproved by the almost Anabaptist 
doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the 
princess." 

We would willingly, as Prostestants, have visited 
this wicked chapel ; but we were prevented from 
seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes of Dosso 
Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the 
prefect was giving a little dinner Qpranzetto) in that 
part of the castle. We were not so greatly disap- 
pointed in reality as we made believe ; but our servi- 
tore di piazza (the unlettered one) was almost moved 
to lesa maestd with vexation. He had been full of 
scorching patriotism the whole morning ; but now 
electing the unhappy and apologetic custodian rep- 
resentative of Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly as- 
sailed the government of the king. In the times of 
His Holiness the Legates had made it their pleasure 
and duty to show the whole castle to strangers. But 
now strangers must be sent away without seeing its 
chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was giv- 
ing a little dinner. Presence of the Devil ! 



FERRARA. 37 



VII. 



In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara 
we noticed devotion in classes of people who are 
devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only came solid- 
looking business men to say their prayers, but gay 
young dandies, who knelt and repeated their orisons 
and then rose and went seriously out. In Venice 
they would have posted themselves against a pillar, 
sucked the heads of their sticks, and made eyes at 
the young ladies kneeling near them. This degree 
of religion was all the more remarkable in Ferrara, 
because that city had been so many years under 
the Pope, and His Holiness contrives commonly to 
prevent the appearance of religion in young men 
throughout his dominions. 

Valery speaks of the delightful society which he 
met in the gray old town ; and it is said that Ferrara 
has a% unusual share of culture in her wealthy class, 
which is large. With such memories of learning 
and literary splendor as belong to her, it would be 
strange if she did not in some form keep alive the 
sacred flame. But, though there may be refinement 
and erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great 
name to modern Italian literature. Her men of 
letters seem to be of that race of grubs singularly 
abundant in Italy, — men who dig out of archives and 
libraries some topic of special and momentary interest 
and print it, unstudied and uphilosophized. Their 
books are material, not literature, and it is marvelous 



38 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

how many of them are published. A writer on anj 
given subject can heap together from them a mass 
of fact and anecdote invaluable in its way; but it 
is a mass without life or light, and must be vivified 
by him who uses it before it can serve the world, 
which does not care for its dead local value. It re- 
mains to be seen whether the free speech and free 
press of Italy can reawaken the intellectual activity 
of the cities which once gave the land so many 
literary capitals. 

What numbers of people used to write verses in 
Ferrara. ! By operation of the principle which causes 
things 'concerning whatever subject you happen to be 
interested in to turn up in every direction, I found 
a volume of these dead-and-gone immortals at a book- 
stall, one day, in Venice. It is a curiously yellow 
and uncomfortable volume of the year 1703, printed 
all in italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd 
rhymers selected from in that book, — and how droll 
the most of them are, with their unmistakable^races 
of descent from Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini ! What 
acres of enameled meadow there are in those pages ! 
Brooks enough to turn all the mills in the world 
go purling through them. I should say some thou- 
sands of nymphs are constantly engaged in weaving 
garlands there, and the swains keep such a piping 
on those familiar notes, — Amove, dolore, crudele, and 
miele. Poor little poets ! they knew no other tunes. 
Do not now weak voices twitter from a hundred 
books, in unconscious imitation of the hour's great 
singers ? 



FERRARA. 39 



VIII. 



I think some of the pleasantest people in Italy are 
the army gentlemen. There is the race's gentleness 
in their ways, in spite of their ferocious trade, and 
an American freedom of style. They brag in a 
manner that makes one feel at home immediately ; 
and met in travel, they are ready to render any little 
kindness. 

The other year at Reggio (which is not far from 
Modena) we stopped to dine at a restaurant where 
the whole garrison had its coat off and was playing 
billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, 
who were dining. These rose and bowed as we 
entered their room, and when the waiter pretended 
that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the 
waiter, for some mysterious reason, always pretends 
that the best dishes are out), they bullied him for the 
honor of Italy, and made him bring them to us. 
Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by 
those brave men. We were in deep despair at find- 
ing no French bread, and the waiter swore with the 
utmost pathos that there was none ; but as soon as 
his back was turned, a tightly laced little captain rose 
and began to forage for the bread. He opened every 
drawer and cupboard in the room, and finding none, 
invaded another room, captured several loaves from 
the plates laid there, and brought them back in 
triumph, presenting them to us amid the applause 
of his comrades. The dismay of the waiter, on his 
return, was ineffable. 



40 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

Three officers, who dined with us at the table 
dliote of the Stella d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent 
dinners were those we ate there), were visibly anxious 
to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still in 
order that we should hear, to speculate on our 
nationality among themselves. It appeared that we 
were Germans ; for one of these officers, who had 
formerly been in the Austrian service at Vienna, 
recognized the word bitter in our remarks on the 
beccafichi. As I did not care to put these fine fel- 
lows to the trouble of hating us for others' faults, I 
made bold to say that we w T ere not Germans, and to 
add that bitter w r as also an English word. Ah ! yes, 
to be sure, one of them admitted ; when he was with 
the Sardinian army in the Crimea, he had frequently 
heard the word used by the English soldiers. He 
nodded confirmation of what he said to his comrades ; 
and then was good enough to display what English 
he knew. It was barely sufficient to impress his 
comrades ; but it led the w T ay to a good deal of talk 
in Italian. 

" I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese? " 
I said. 

" Not at all," said our Crimean. " I am from 
Como ; this gentleman, il signor Conte, (il signor 
Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza ; and our friend across 
the table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal 
to unify Italy. We are all Italians now, and you 
see we speak Italian, and not our dialects, to- 
gether.'' 

My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see 



PERRARA. 41 

them all united under one flag, after so many ages 
of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the talk upon 
the origin of the Italian flag ; and that led our 
Crimean to ask what was the origin of the English 
colors. 

" I scarcely know," I said. " We are Americans." 

Our friends at once grew more cordial. " Oh, 
Americani ! " They had great pleasure of it. Did 
we think Signor Leencolen would be reelected ? 

I supposed that he had been elected that day, 
I said. 

Ah ! this was the election day, then. Cospetto ! 

At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, 
and the Crimean gazing admiringly upon him, said 
he had been nine months at Nuova York, and that 
he had a brother living there. The poor Crimean 
boastfully added that he himself had a cousin in 
America, and that the Americans generally spoke 
Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an air of 
pathetic discomfiture, and tried to invent a trans- 
atlantic relative, as I think, but failed. 

I am persuaded that none of these warriors really 
had kinsmen in America, but that they all pretended 
to have them, out of politeness to us, and that they 
believed each other. It was very kind of them, and 
we were so grateful that we put no embarrassing 
questions. Indeed, the conversation presently took 
another course, and grew to include the whole table. 

There was an extremely pretty Italian present 
with her newly wedded husband, who turned out to 
be a retired officer. He fraternized at once with our 



42 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and 
made military obeisances. Having asked leave to 
light their cigars, they were smoking — the sweet 
young bride blowing a fairy cloud from her rosy lips 
with the rest. " Indeed," I heard an Italian lady 
once remark, " why should men pretend to deny us 
the privilege of smoking ? It is so pleasant and 
innocent." It is but just to the Italians to say that 
they do not always deny it; and there is, without 
doubt, a certain grace and charm in a pretty fuma- 
triee. I suppose it is a habit not so pleasing in an 
ugly or middle-aged woman. 



IV, 

THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 



We had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, 
but just at that time the storms predicted on the 
Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by Mathieu de la 
Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the rail- 
way communications were broken in every direction. 
The magnificent work through and under the Apen- 
nines, between Bologna and Florence, had been 
washed away by the mountain torrents in a dozen 
places, and the roads over the plains of the Romagna 
had been sapped by the flood, and rendered useless, 
where not actually laid under water. 

On the day of our intended departure we left the 
hotel, with other travellers, gayly incredulous of the 
landlord's fear that no train would start for Bologna. 
At the station we found a crowd of people waiting 
and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in 
some faces, and the labeled employe's of the railway 
wore looks of ominous importance. Of course the 
crowd did not lose its temper. It sought information 
of the officials running to and fro with telegrams, in 
a spirit of national sweetness, and consoled itself 



44 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

with saying, as Italy has said under all circumstances 
of difficulty for centuries : Ci vuol pazienza ! At last 
a blank silence fell upon it, as the Capo-Stazione 
advanced toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, 
and spoke to him quietly. The well-dressed man 
lifted his forefinger and waved it back and forth before 
his face : — 

The Well-dressed Man. — Dunque, non si parte 
piu ? (No departures, then ?) 

The Capo-Stazione (waving his forefinger in like 
manner.) — Non si parte piu. (Like a mournful 
echo.) 

We knew quite as well from this pantomime of 
negation as from the dialogue our sad fate, and sub- 
mitted to it. Some adventurous spirit demanded 
whether any trains would go on the morrow. The 
Capo-Stazione, with an air of one who would not 
presume to fathom the designs of Providence, re- 
sponded : " Who knows ? To-day, certainly not. 
To-morrow, perhaps. But " — and vanished. 

It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing 
things to say that, as we understood, this break in 
the line was only a few miles in extent, that trains 
could have approached both to and from Bologna, 
and that a little enterprise on the part of the company 
could have passed travellers from one side to the 
other with very small trouble or delay. But the 
railway company was as much daunted by the in- 
undation as a peasant going to market, and for two 
months after the accident no trains carried passengers 
from one city to the other. No doubt, however, the 



THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 4£ 

line was under process of very solid repair mean- 
while. 

For the present the only means of getting to 
Bologna was by carriage on the old highway, and 
accordingly we took passage thither in the omnibus, 
of the Stella d'Oro. 

There was little to interest us in the country over 
which we rode. It is perfectly flat, and I suppose 
the reader knows what quantities of hemp and flax 
are raised there. The land seems poorer than in 
Lombardy, and the farm-houses and peasants' cottages 
are small and mean, though the peasants themselves, 
when we met them, looked well fed, and were cer- 
tainly well clad. The landscape lay soaking in a 
dreary drizzle the whole way, and the town of Cento 
when we reached it, seemed miserably conscious of 
being too wet and dirty to go iivdoors, and was 
loitering about in the rain. Our arrival gave the 
poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing 
as an omnibus had not been seen there since the 
railway of Bologna and Ferrara was built'. We went 
into the principal caff& to lunch, — a caffe much too 
large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned 
sofas, and a cold, forlorn air of half-starved gentility, 
a clean, high-roofed caffe and a breezy, — and thither 
the youthful nobility and gentry of the place followed 
us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they might sit 
down and give us the pleasure of their distinguished 
company. They put on their very finest manners, 
and took their most captivating attitudes for the 
ladies' sake ; and the gentlemen of our party fancied 



46 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

that it was for them these young men began to dio 
cuss the Roman question. How loud they were, 
and how earnest ! And how often they consulted 
the newspapers of the caffd ! (Older newspapers I 
never saw off a canal-boat.) I may tire some time 
of the artless vanity of the young Italians, so in- 
nocent, so amiable, so transparent, but I think I 
never shall. 

The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, 
and they have a noble and beautiful statue of him 
in the piazza, which the town caused to be erected 
from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his 
house was kept for a show to the public ; it was full 
of the pictures of the painter and many mementos 
of him ; but recently the paintings have been taken 
to the gallery, and the house is now closed. The 
gallery is, consequently, one of the richest second- 
rate galleries in Italy, and one may spend much 
longer time in it than we gave, with great profit. 
There are some most interesting heads of Christ, 
painted, as Guercino always painted the Saviour, with 
a great degree of humanity in the face. It is an 
excellent countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but 
quite different from the conventional face of Christ. 



ii. 

At night we were again in Bologna, of which we 
had not seen the gloomy" arcades for two years. It 
must be a dreary town at all times : in a rain it is 
horrible; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities. 



THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 47 



Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind, and 
comfortless. The effect of the buildings vaulted 
above the sidewalks is that of a continuous cellar- 
way ; your view of the street is constantly interrupted 
by the heavy brick pillars that support the arches ; the 
arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to 
leave Bologna as quickly as possible, and, on this 
occasion, learning that there was no hope of crossing 
the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to take 
the first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence 
directly to Naples by steamer. 

It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel 
Brun the morning after our arrival in Bologna to a 
breakfast of murky coffee and furry beefsteaks, as- 
sociated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. 
I am sure that if each of our weather-bound pilgrims 
had told his story, we had been as well entertained 
as those at Canterbury. However, no one thought 
fit to give his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew 
from London, who told us how he had been made 
to pay fifteen guineas for a carriage to cross the 
Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of the 
way at that price. He was evidently proud, now 
the money was gone, of having been cheated of so 
much ; and in him we saw that there was at least 
one human being more odious than a purse-proud 
Englishman — namely, a purse-proud English Jew. 
He gave his noble name after a while, as something 
too precious to be kept from the company, when 
recommending one of the travellers to go to the Hotel 
V Angleterre in Rome : " The best 'otel out of Eng- 



48 ITALIAN JOURNEYS, 

land. You may mention my name, if you like — 
Mr. Jonas." The recipient of this favor noted down 
the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr. 
Jonas, conscious of having conferred a benefit on his 
race, became more odious to it than ever. An Eng- 
lishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original 
that no one can copy him, though many may carica- 
ture. I saw an American in London once who 
thought himself an Englishman because he wore leg- 
of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suf- 
frage and republics, and had an appetite for high 
game. He was a hateful animal, surely, but he was 
not the British lion ; and this poor Hebrew at Bologna 
was not a whit more successful in his imitation of 
the illustrious brute, though he talked, like him, of 
nothing but hotels, and routes of travel, and hack- 
men and porters, and seemed to have nothing to do 
in Italy but get through it as quickly and abusively 
as possible. 

We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at 
Bologna and take the noon train for Genoa. In our 
car there were none but Italians, and the exchange of 
" La Perseveranza" of Milan for " IlPopolo '' of Tu- 
rin with one of them quickly opened the way for con- 
versation and acquaintance. (JEn passant : I know 
of no journal in the United States whose articles are 
better than those of the " Perseveranza" and it was 
gratifying to an American to read in this ablest jour- 
nal of Italy nothing but applause and encouragement 
of the national side in our late war.) My new-made 
friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was a phy- 



THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 49 

sician, and had served as a surgeon in the late war of 
Italian independence ; but was now placed in a hospital 
in Milan. There was a gentle little blonde with him, 
and at Piacenza, where we stopped for lunch, " You 
see," said he, indicating the lady, "we are newly 
married," — which was, indeed, plain enough to any 
one who looked at their joyous faces, and observed 
how great disposition that little blonde had to nestle 
on the young man's broad shoulder. " I have a 
week's leave from my place," he went on, " and this 
is our wedding journey. We were to have gone to 
Florence, but it seems we are fated not to see that 
famous city." 

He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein 
greatly amused us Americans, who had outgrown 
distances. 

" So w r e are going to Genoa instead, for two or 
three days." " Oh, have you ever been at Genoa ? " 
broke in the bride. " What magnificent palaces ! 
And then the bay, and the villas in the environs ! 
There is the Villa Pallavicini, w T ith beautiful gardens, 
where an artificial shower breaks out from the bushes, 
and sprinkles the people who pass. Such fun! " and 
she continued to describo vividly a city of which she 
had only heard from her husband ; and it was easy 
to see that she walked in paradise wherever he led 
her. 

They say that Italian husbands and wives do not 

long remain fond of each other, but it was impossi- 

, ble in the presence of these happy people not to be- 

4 



50 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

lieve in the eternity of their love, and it was hard to 
keep from " dropping into poetry " on account of 
them. Their bliss infected every body in the car, 
and in spite of the weariness of our journey, and the 
vexation of the misadventures which had succeeded 
one another unsparingly ever since we left home, we 
found ourselves far on the way to Genoa before we 
thought to grumble at the distance. There was with 
us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling from 
Bologna to Turin, who had learned English in Lon- 
don, and spoke it much better than most Londoners. 
It is surprising how thoroughly Italians master a lan- 
guage so alien to their own as ours, and how frequently 
you find them acquainted with English. From 
Russia the mania for this tongue has' spread all over 
the Continent, and in Italy English seems to be 
prized first among the virtues. 

As we drew near Genoa, the moon came out on 
purpose to show us the superb city, and we strove 
eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud capital where 
Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse 
was but slight and false, for railways always enter 
cities by some mean level, from which any pictur- 
esque view is impossible. 

Near the station in Genoa, however, is the weak 
and ugly monument which the municipality has lately 
raised to Columbus. The moon made the best of 
this, which stands in a wide open space, and con- 
trived, with an Italian skill in the arrangement of 
light, to produce an effect of undeniable splendor. 



THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 51 

On the morrow, we found out by the careless candor 
of the daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus 
had, and how the sculptor had not very happily 
thought proper to represent him with his sea-legs on. 



UP AND DOWN GENOA. 

I had my note-book with me on this journey, and 
pledged myself to make notes in it. And, indeed, I 
did really do something of the kind, though the re- 
sult of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I 
would like it to be, now when the work of wishing 
there were more notes is so easy. We spent but one 
day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous succinct 
record of this in my book that I am tempted to give 
it here, after the fashion of that Historical Heavy- 
weight who writes the Life of " Frederick the Great." 

" Grenoa, November 13. — Breakfast a la fourchette 
excellently and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to 
seek the Consul, and, after finding every thing else 
for two hours, find him. Genoa is the most magnifi- 
cent city I ever saw ; and the new monument to 
Columbus about the weakest possible monument. 
Walk through the city with Consul ; Doge's palace ; 
cathedral ; girl turning somersaults in the street ; 
blind madman on the cathedral steps. We leave for 
Naples at twelve midnight." 

As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the 
many good caffd in Genoa, and perhaps some statis- 



UP AND DOWN GENOA. 53 

tician will like to know that for a beefsteak and pota- 
toes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a 
franc. For this money we had also the society of an 
unoccupied waiter, who leaned against a marble col- 
umn and looked on, with that gentle, half-compassion- 
ate interest in our appetites, which seems native to 
the tribe of waiters. A slight dash of surprise is 
in this professional manner ; and there is a faint 
smile on the solemn, professional countenance, w T hich 
is perhaps prompted by too intimate knowledge of the 
mysteries of the kitchen and the habits of the cook. 
The man who passes his life among beefsteaks can- 
not be expected to love them, or to regard without 
wonder the avidity with which others devour them. 
I imagine that service in restaurants must beget 
simple and natural tastes in eating, and that the 
jaded men who minister there to our pampered ap- 
petites demand only for themselves — 

"A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied, 
And water from the spring." 

Turning from this thought to the purchase of my 
nat, I do not believe that literary art can interest the 
reader in that purely personal transaction, though I 
have no doubt that a great deal might be said about 
buying hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to 
pass to our search for the Consul. 

A former Consul at , whom I know, has told 

me a good many stories about the pieces of popu- 
lar mind which he received at different times from 
the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of 
discovery ; and I think it must be one of the most 



54 ITALIAN JO-URNEYS. 

jealously guarded rights of American citizens in for- 
eign lands to declare the national representative hard 
to find, if there is no other complaint to lodge against 
him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of 
consulship at , to be found remote and inac- 
cessible. My friend says that even at New York, 
before setting out for his post", when inquiring into 
the history of his predecessors, he heard that they 
were one and all hard to find ; and he relates that on 
the steamer, going over, there was a low fellow who 
set the table in a roar by a vulgar anecdote to this 
effect : — 

" There was once a consul at , who indi- 
cated his office-hours by the legend on his door, ' In 
from ten to one.' An old ship-captain, who kept 
coming for about a week without finding the Consul, 
at last furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under 
this legend, ' Ten to one you 're out ! ' " 

My friend also states that one day a visitor of his 
remarked : " I 'm rather surprised to find you in. As 
a general rule, I never do find consuls in." Habitu- 
ally, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with ac- 
counts of their misadventures in reaching him. It 
was useless to represent to them that his house was 
in the most convenient locality in , where, in- 
deed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his hotel 
without losing himself ; that their guide was an ass, 
or their courier a rogue. They listened to him po- 
litely, but they never pardoned him in the least; and 
neither will I forgive the Consul at Genoa. I had 
no earthly consular business with him, but a private 



UP AND DOWN GENOA. 55 

favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reason- 
ably expect to find him at his office, or any body to 
tell me where he lived ; but I have seldom had so 
keen a sense of personal wrong and national neglect 
as in mv search for that Consul's house. 

In Italy there is no species of fact with which any 
human being you meet will not pretend to have per- 
fect acquaintance, and, of course, the driver whose 
fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to 
the Consul's whereabouts, and took us successively 
to the residences of the consuls of all the South 
American republics. It occurred to me that it might 
be well to inquire of these officials where their col- 
league was to be found ; but it is true that not one 
consul of them was at home ! Their doors were 
opened by vacant old women, in whom a vague intel- 
ligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring 
candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of 
light on the object of my search, successively flick- 
ered out, and left me in total darkness. 

Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights 
stairs were capable. As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is 
either all up or down hill, so in-doors it is either all 
up or down stairs. Ascending and descending, in one 
palace after another, those infinite marble steps, it 
became a question not solved to this hour, whether it 
was worse to ascend or descend, — each ordeal in its 
turn seemed so much more terrible than the other. 

At last I resolved to come to an understanding 
with the driver, and I spent what little breath I had 
left — it was dry and hot as the simoom — in blow- 



56 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

ing up that infamous man. u You are a great 
driver," I said, " not to know your own city. What 
are you good for if you can't take a foreigner to his 
consul's ? " " Signore," answered the driver pa- 
tiently, " you would have to get a book in two vol- 
umes by heart, in order to be able to find every 
body in Genoa. This city is a labyrinth." 

Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe 
in my good luck when I actually found my friend, 
and set out with him on a ramble through its toils. 

A very great number of the streets in Genoa are 
footways merely, and these are as narrow, as dark, as 
full of jutting chimney-places, balconies, and opened 
window-shutters, and as picturesque as the little alleys 
in Venice. They wander at will around the bases 
of the gloomy old stone palaces, and seem to have a 
vagabond fondness for creeping down to the port, and 
losing themselves there in a certain cavernous arcade 
which curves round the water with the flection of the 
shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under 
it are clangorous shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling 
shops of marine cooks, and, looking down its dim 
perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and 
going, more or less affected by strong waters ; and as 
the faces to which these sea-legs belong draw near, 
one discerns sailors from all parts of the world, — 
tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as diverse in 
their tawniness as olive and train-oil ; sharp faces 
from Nantucket and from the Piraeus, likewise might- 
ily different in their sharpness ; blonde Germans and 
blonde Englishmen ; and now and then a colored 



UP AND DOWN GENOA. 57 

brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, 
more or less affected by strong waters like the rest. 

What curious people are these seafarers ! They 
coast the whole world, and know nothing of it, being 
more ignorant and helpless than children on shore. 
I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at 
Venice, and asked him how he liked the city. 

Well, he had not been ashore yet. 

He was told he had better go ashore ; that the 
Piazza San Marco was worth seeing. 

Well, he knew it ; he had seen pictures of it ; but 
he guessed he would n't go ashore. 

Why not, now he was here ? 

Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he 
came to Venice. 

And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks 
at Venice with his ship, after a voyage of two months, 
and he sailed away without ever setting his foot on 
that enchanted ground. 

I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers 
and ask them w r hat they thought of Genoa. 

It must have been. in the little streets — impassable 
for horses — that the people sat and talked, as Heine 
fabled, in their doorways, and touched knees with the 
people sitting and talking on the thresholds of the 
opppsite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our 
Sunday in Genoa ; and I think the domestic race of 
Heine's day no longer lives in Genoa, for every body 
we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the idea 
of the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the 
public promenades. The fashions were French ; but 



58 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

here still lingers the lovely phantom of the old na- 
tional costume of Genoa, and snow-white veils flut- 
tered from many a dark head, and caressed many an 
olive cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of 
attirements, this white veil, and, while decking 
beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends and 
modifies age and ugliness. 

The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of 
an Italian crowd in winter is always touched with 
melancholy. I know that, at the time of its noonday 
promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its 
stomach ; that it has emerged from a house as cold 
and dim as a cellar ; and that it will presently go 
home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I know that 
chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid 
gloves, and I see in the rawness of its faces the an- 
guish of winter-long suffering from cold. But I also 
look at many in this crowd with the eye of the econ- 
omist, and wonder how people practicing even so 
great self-denial as they can contrive to make so 
much display on their little means, — how those 
clerks of public offices, who have rarely an income 
of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such 
peerless gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct 
teaches them ways and means unknown to us. The 
passion for dress is universal : the men are as fond of 
it as the women ; and, happily, clothes are compara- 
tively cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this dis- 
play : it is only a pity that there is often nothing, or 
worse than nothing, under the shining surface. 

We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon 



UP AND DOWN GENOA. 59 

the hill where the public promenade overlooks a land- 
scape of city and country, houses and gardens, vines 
and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, 
it is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain 
was — 

" Shaking its loosened silver in the sun ; " 

the birds were singing; and there weie innumerable 
fair girls going by, about whom one might have made 
romances if one had not known better. Our friend 
pointed out to us the " pink jail " in which Dickens 
lived while at Genoa, ; and showed us on the brow of 
a distant upland the villa, called II Paradiso, which 
Byron had occupied. I dare say this Genoese joke 
is already in print : That the Devil reentered Para- 
dise w T hen Byron took this villa. Though, in loveli- 
est Italy, one is half-persuaded that the Devil had 
never left Paradise. 

After lingering a little longer on that delicious 
height, we turned and went down for a stroll through 
the city. 

My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnifi- 
cent city I ever saw, and I hold by my note-book, 
though I hardly know how to prove it. Venice is, 
and remains, the most beautiful city in the world ; 
but her ancient rival impresses you with greater 
splendor. I suppose that the exclusively Renaissance 
architecture, which Ruskin declares the architecture 
of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in Genoa. 
It is here in its best mood, and there is little gro- 
tesque Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces 



60 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

are, as usual, loaded with ornament. The Via Nu« 
ova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the crowd 
pours through this avenue between long lines of pal- 
aces. Height on height rise the stately, sculptured 
facades, colonnaded, statued, pierced by mighty door- 
ways and lofty windows ; and the palaces seem to 
gain a kind of aristocratic hauteur from the fact that 
there are for the most part no sidewalks, and that 
the carriages, rolling insolently through the crowd, 
threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up against 
their earven marbles, and immolate him to their stony 
pride. There is something gracious and gentle in the 
grandeur of Venice, and much that the heart loves 
to cling to ; but in Genoa no sense of kindliness is 
touched by the magnificence of the city. 

It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to 
come, on a sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few 
Gothic buildings in Genoa, and rest our jaded eyes 
on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to 
have put into the thoughts of man together with the 
Christian faith. O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, 
of slender and clustered columns, of flowering capi- 
tals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths 
and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blos- 
soms again ! There is neither Greek perfection, nor 
winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent Renaissance 
opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of 
yours ! Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple 
of Genoa should abound in the abomination of rococo 
restoration ! They say that the dust of St. John the 
Baptist lies there within a costly shrine ; and I won- 



UP AND DOWN GENOA. 61 

der that it can sleep in peace amid all that heathen- 
ish show of bad taste. But the poor saints have to 
suffer a great deal in Italy. 

Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was 
an idle, cruel crowd, amusing itself with the efforts 
of a blind old man to find the entrance. He had a 
number of books which he desperately laid down 
while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered 
columns, and which he then desperately caught up 
again, in fear of losing them. At other times he 
paused, and wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, 
or wildly threw up his arms ; and then began to run 
to and fro again uneasily, while the crow r d laughed 
and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness afflicted 
him ; but not the less he seemed the type of a blind 
soul that gropes darkly about through life, to find the 
doorway of some divine truth or beauty, — touched 
by the heavenly harmonies from within, and misera- 
bly failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee of 
those who have no will but to mock aspiration. 

The girl turning somersaults in another place had 
far more popular sympathy than the blind madman at 
the temple door, but she was hardly a more cheerful 
spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like 
brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon 
her honest, blood-red face, as if this were business 
though it looked like sport, and her part of the diver- 
sion were as practical as that of the famous captain 
of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of 
potatoes a playful effect by standing on his head. The 
poor damsel was going over and over, to the sound of 



62 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

most dismal drumming and braying, in front of the 
immense old palace of the Genoese Doges, — a clas- 
sic building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy 
of Palladio, if any body thinks that is praise. 

There was little left of our day when we had 
dined ; but having seen the outside of Genoa, and 
not hoping to see the inside, we found even this little 
heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew 
near when we were to take the steamer for Naples. 

It had been one of the noisiest days spent during 
several years in clamorous Italy, whose voicefuj up- 
roar strikes to the summits of her guardian Alps, and 
greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio 
would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile 
become habituated to the operatic pitch of her every- 
day tones. In Genoa, the hotels, taking counsel of 
the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous ar- 
cade already mentioned, and all the noise of the ship- 
ping reaches their guests. We rose early that Sun- 
day morning to the sound of a fleet unloading car- 
goes of wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of all 
nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the 
tumult followed us, and seemed to culminate at last 
in the screams of a parrot, wdio thought it fine to 
cry, " JPiove ! piove ! piove ! " — "It rains ! it 
rains ! it rains ! " — and had, no doubt, a secret 
interest in some umbrella-shop. This unprincipled 
bird dwelt somewhere in the neighborhood of the 
street where you see the awful tablet in the wall 
devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic 
that were false to their country. The sight of that 



UP AND DOWN GENOA. 63 

pitiless stone recalls with a thrill the picturesque, un- 
happy past, with all the wandering, half-benighted 
efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now 
a foreign and now a native lord. At best, they only 
knew how to avenge their wrongs ; but now, let us 
hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent 
them. The will was never w r anting of old to the 
Ligurian race, and in this time they have done their 
full share to establish Italian freedom. 

I do not know why it should have been so surpris- 
ing to hear the boatman who rowed us to the steam- 
er's anchorage speak English ; but, after his harsh 
Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water, 
it was the last thing we expected from him. It 
had somehow the effect of a furious beast address- 
ing you in your native tongue, and telling you it was 
" Wary poordy wedder ; " and it made us cling to 
his good-nature with the trembling solicitude of 
Little Red-Riding-Hood, when she begins to have 
the first faint suspicions of her grandmother. How- 
ever, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our 
six cents of buonamano with the base servility of a 
Christian man, when he had put our luggage in the 
cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should have 
known us for Americans ? He did so know us, and 
said he had been at New York in better days, when 
he voyaged upon higher seas than those he now nav- 
igated. 

On board, we watched with compassion an old 
gentleman in the cabin making a hearty meal of sar- 
dines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if he had ever 



64 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over 
that innocent old gentleman's childlike confidence of 
appetite, and guileless trust of the deep. 

We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings 
of our party declared that she would remain as long 
as Genoa was in sight ; and to tell the truth, the 
scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, 
in a half-circle before us, blazed the lights of the 
quay ; above these twinkled the lamps of the steep 
streets and climbing palaces ; over and behind all 
hung the darkness on the heights, — a sable cloud 
dotted with ruddy points of flame burning in tht, 
windows of invisible houses. 

" Merrily did we drop M 

down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell 
of the open sea. The other gentle being of our 
party then clutched my shoulder with a dreadful 
shudder, and after gasping, " O Mr. Scribbler, why 
will the ship roll so ? " was meekly hurried below by 
her sister, who did not return for a last glimpse of 
Genoa the Proud. 

In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as 
with the sea-gull's wings, and I too felt that there 
was no help for it, and that I must go and lie down 
in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon 
the shelf opposite to mine the innocent old gentleman 
who had lately supped so confidently on sardines and 
fruit-pie. He lay upon his back, groaning softly to 
himself. 



VI. 

BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 



Like the Englishman who had no prejudices, I do 
hate a Frenchman ; and there were many French- 
men among our passengers on the Messina, in whose 
company I could hardly have been happy, had I not 
seen them horribly sea- sick. After. the imprudent 
old gentleman of the sardines and fruit-pie, these 
wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with the 
malady, which became epidemic, and were miserable 
up to the last moment on board. To the enormity 
of having been born Frenchmen, they added the 
crime of being commercial travellers, — a class of fel- 
low-men of whom we know little at home, but who 
are met everywhere in European travel. They spend 
more than half their lives in movement from place 
to place, and they learn to snatch from every kind of 
travel its meagre comforts, with an insolent disregard 
of the rights and feelings of other passengers. They 
excuse an abominable trespass with a cool " Pardon ! " 
take the best seat everywhere, and especially treat 
women with a savage rudeness, to which an Ameri- 
can vainly endeavors to accustom his temper. I have 



66 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

seen commercial travellers of all nations, and I think 
I must award the French nation the discredit of pro- 
ducing the most odious commercial travellers in the 
world. The Englishman of this species wraps him- 
self in his rugs, and rolls into his corner, defiantly, 
but not aggressively, boorish ; the Italian is almost a 
gentleman ; the German is apt to take sausage out 
of a newspaper and eat it with his penknife ; the 
Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond endur- 
ance by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident in- 
tention not only to keep all his own advantages, but 
to steal some of yours upon the first occasion. There 
were three of these monsters on our steamer : one a 
slight, bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and 
an incredulous grin ; another, a gigantic full-bearded 
animal in spectacles ; the third an infamous plump 
little creature, in absurdly tight pantaloons, with a 
cast in his eye, and a habit of sucking his teeth at 
table. When this wretch was not writhing in the 
agonies of sea- sickness, he was on deck with his com- 
rades, lecturing them upon various things, to which 
the bloodless voung man listened with his incredulous 
grin, and the bearded, giant in spectacles attended 
with a choked look about the eyes, like a suffering 
ox. They were constantly staggering in and out of 
their state-room, which, for my sins, was also mine ; 
and opening their abominable commodious travelling 
bags, or brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling 
mirror, and since they were born into the world, I 
think they had never cleaned their finger-nails. 
They wore their hats at dinner, but always went 
away, after soup, deadly pale. 



BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 67 



II. 

In contrast with these cattle, what polished and 
courtly gentlemen were the sailors and firemen ! As 
for our captain, he would in any company have won 
notice for his gentle and high-bred way ; in his place 
at the head of the table among these Frenchmen, he 
seemed to me the finest gentleman I had ever seen. 
He had spent his whole life at sea, and had voyaged 
in all parts of the world except Japan, where he 
meant some day, he said, to go. He had been first 
a cabin-boy on a little Genoese schooner, and he had 
gradually risen to the first place on a sailing-vessel, 
and now he had been selected to fill a commander's 
post on this line of steamers. (It is an admirable line 
of boats, not belonging I believe to the Italian gov- 
ernment, but much under its control, leaving Genoa 
every day for Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and Ancona, 
on the Adriatic coast.) The captain had sailed a good 
deal in American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific 
coast, trading from the Spanish republican ports to 
those of California. He had been in that State dur- 
ing its effervescent days, when every thing foul 
floated to the top, and I am afraid he formed there 
but a bad opinion of our people, though he was far 
too courteous to say outright any thing of this sort. 

He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather- 
beaten, kindly face, and a cautious way of saying 
things. I hardly expected him to turn out so red-hot 
a Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but being 



68 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

a warm friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Gar- 
ibaldi was the beginning and ending of his political 
faith, as he is with everv enthusiastic Italian. The 
honest soul's conception of all concrete evil was 
brought forth in two words, of odd enough applica- 
tion. In Europe, and Italy more particularly, true 
men have suffered chiefly from this form of evil, and 
the captain evidently could conceive of no other cause 
of suffering anywhere. We were talking of the 
American war, and when the captain had asked the 
usual question, " Quando finird mat questa guerra?" 
and I had responded as usual, "Ah, ci vuol pazienza /" 
the captain gave a heavy sigh, and turning his head 
pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a 
moment in silence. 

Then he said : " You Americans are in the habit 
of attributing this war to slavery. The cause is not 
sufficient." 

I ventured to demur and explain. "No," said the 
captain, " the cause is not sufficient. We Italians 
know the only cause which could produce a war like 
this." 

I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Ital- 
ian theory, hoping it might be profounder than the 
English notion that we were fighting about tariffs. 

The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and 
then said : — 

" In this world there is but one cause of mischief 
— the Jesuits." 



BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 69 



III. 



The first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was 
bad enough, but that which succeeded our departure 
from the latter port was by far the worst of the three 
we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied 
the happy people who went ashore at Leghorn ! I 
think we even envied the bones of the Venetians, 
Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each other 
in the long-forgotten sea-fights, and sank too deeply 
through the waves to be stirred by their restless tu- 
mult. Every one has heard tell of how cross and 
treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in winter, and 
my own belief is, that he who has merely been sea- 
sick on the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a 
trial before professing to have suffered every thing of 
which human nature is capable. Our steamer was 
clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not 
large — no bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that 
night as the waves tossed her to and fro, till unwinged 
things took flight all through her cabins and over her 
decks. My berth was placed transversely instead of 
lengthwise with the boat, — an ingenious arrange- 
ment to heighten sea-sick horrors, and dash the blood 
of the sufferer from brain to boots with exaggerated 
violence at each roll of the boat ; and I begged the 
steward to let me sleep upon one of the lockers in the 
cabin. I found many of my agonized species already 
laid out there ; and the misery of the three French 
commercial travellers was so great, that, in the excess 



70 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

of my own dolor, it actually afforded me a kind of 
happiness, and I found myself smiling at times to see 
the giant, with the eyes of a choked ox, rise up and 
faintly bellow. Indeed, there was something eldritch 
and unearthly in the whole business, and I think a 
kind of delirium must have resulted from the sea-sick- 
ness. Otherwise, I shall not know how to account for 
having attributed a kind of consciousness and individ- 
uality to the guide-book of a young American who 
had come aboard at Leghorn. He turned out after- 
ward to be the sweetest soul in the world, and I am 
sorry now that I regarded with amusement his failure 
to smoke off his sickness. He was reading his guide- 
book with great diligence and unconcern, when sud- 
denly I marked him lay it softly, softly down, with 
that excessive deliberation which men use at such 
times, and vanish with great dignity from the scene. 
Thus abandoned to its own devices, this guide-book 
began its night-long riots, setting out upon a tour of 
the cabin with the first lurch of the boat that threw 
it from the table upon the floor. I heard it careen at 
once wildly to the cabin door, and knock to get out ; 
and failing in this, return more deliberately to the 
stern of the boat, interrogating the tables and chairs, 
which had got their sea-legs on, and asking them how 
they found themselves. Arrived again at the point 
of starting, it seemed to pause a moment, and then I 
saw it setting forth on a voyage of pleasure in the 
low company of a French hat, which, being itself a 
French book, I suppose it liked. In these travels 
they both ran under the feet of one of the stewards, 



BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 71 

and were replaced by an immense tour de force on 
the table, from which the book eloped again, — this 
time in company with an overcoat ; but it seemed 
the coat was too miserable to go far : it stretched it- 
self at full length on the floor, and suffered the book, 
to dance over it, back and forth, I know not how 
many times. At last, as the actions of the book were 
becoming unendurable, and the general sea-sickness 
was waxing into a frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the 
whole ship shriek and tremble, threw us all from our 
lockers ; and gathering myself up, bruised and sore 
in every fibre, I lay down again and became sensible 
of a blissful, blissful lull ; the machinery had stopped, 
and with the mute hope that we were all going to the 
bottom, I fell tranquilly asleep. 



IV. 

It appeared that the storm had really been danger- 
ous. Instead of being only six hours from Naples, 
as we ought to be at this time, we were got no fur- 
ther than Porto Longone, in the Isle of Elba. We 
woke in a quiet, sheltered little bay, whence we could 
only behold, not feel, the storm left far out upon the 
open sea. From this we turned our heavy eyes 
gladly to the shore, where a white little town was 
settled, like a flight of gulls upon the beach, at the 
feet of green and pleasant hills, whose gentle lines 
rhymed softly away against the sky. At the end of 
either arm of the embracing land in which we lay, 
stood gray, placid old forts, with peaceful sentries 



72 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

pacing their bastions, and weary ships creeping round 
their feet, under guns looking out so kindly and 

harmlessly, that I think General himself 'would 

not have hesitated (except, perhaps, from a profound 
sentiment of regret for offering the violence) to at- 
tack them. Our port was full of frightened shipping 
— steamers, brigs, and schooners — of all sizes and 
nations ; and since it was our misfortune that Napo- 
leon spent his exile in Elba at Porto Ferrato instead 
of Porto Longone, we amused ourselves with looking 
at the vessels and the white town and the soft hills, 
instead of hunting up dead lion's tracks. 

Our fellow-passengers began to develop themselves : 
the regiment of soldiers whom we were transporting 
picturesquely breakfasted forward, and the second- 
cabin people came aft to our deck, while the English 
engineer (there are English engineers on all the 
Mediterranean steamers) planted a camp-stool in a 
sunny spot, and sat down to read the " Birmingham 
Express." 

Our friends of the second cabin were chiefly officers 
with their wives and families, and they talked for the 
most part of their sufferings during the night. They 
spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought them 
Tuscans, but they told me they were of Sicily, where 
their beautiful speech first had life. Let us hear what 
they talked of in their divine language, and with that 
ineffable tonic accent which no foreigner perfectly 
acquires ; and let us for once translate the profanities, 
Pagan and Christian, which adorn common parlance 
in Italy : — 



BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 73 

" Ah, my God ! how much I suffered ! " says a 
sweet little woman with gentle brown eyes, red, red 
lips, and blameless Greek lines of face. " I broke 
two basins ! " 

" There were ten broken in all, by Diana !" says 
this lady's sister. 

" Presence of the Devil ! " says her husband ; and 

" Body of Bacchus ! " her young brother, puffing 
his cigar. 

u And you, sir," said the lady, turning to a hand- 
some young fellow in civil dress, near her, " how did 
you pass this horrible night ? " 

" Oh ! " says the young man, twirling his heavy 
blond mustache, " mighty well, mighty well ! " 

" Oh mercy of God ! You were not sick ? " 

" I, signora, am never sea-sick. I am of the navy." 

At which they all cry oh, and ah, and declare they 
are glad of it, though why they should have been I 
don't know to this day. 

" I have often wished," added the young man 
meditatively, and in a serious tone, as if he had 
indeed given the subject much thought, " that it 
might please God to let me be sea-sick once, if only 
that I might know how it feels. But no ! " He 
turned the conversation, as if his disappointment were 
too sore to dwell upon ; and hearing our English, he 
made out to let us know that he had been at New 
York, and could spik our language, which he pro- 
ceeded to do, to the great pride of his countrymen, 
and our own astonishment at the remarkable forms 
of English speech to which he gave utterance. 



74 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 



We set out from Porto Longone that night at eight 
o'clock, and next evening, driving through much- 
abated storm southward into calm waters and clear 
skies, reached Naples. At noon, Monte Circeo, 
where Circe led her disreputable life, was a majestic 
rock against blue heaven and broken clouds ; after 
nightfall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius crept 
softly up from the sea, and stood a graceful steep, 
with wreaths of lightest cloud upon its crest, and the 
city lamps circling far round its bay. 



VH. 

CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 



Perhaps some reader of mine who visited Naples 
under the old disorder of things, when the Bourbon 
and the Camorra reigned, will like to hear that the 
pitched battle which travellers formerly fought, in 
landing from their steamer, is now gone out of fashion. 
Less truculent boatmen I never saw than those who 
rowed us ashore at Naples ; they were so quiet and 
peaceful that they harmonized perfectly with that 
tranquil scene of drowsy-twinkling city lights, slum- 
brous mountains, and calm sea, and, as they dipped 
softly toward us in the glare of the steamer's lamps, 
I could only think of Tennyson's description : — 

" And round about the keel with faces pale, 
Dark faces pale against the rosy flame, 
The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came." 

The mystery of this placidity had been already solved 
by our captain, whom I had asked what price I 
should bargain to pay from the steamer to the shore. 
" There is a tariff," said he, " and the boatmen keep 
to it. The Neapolitans are good people, (buona gente,*) 
and only needed justice to make them obedient to 
the laws." I must say that I found this to be true. 



7G ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

The fares of all public conveyances are now fixed, 
and the. attempts which drivers occasionally make to 
cheat you, seem to be rather the involuntary impulses 
of old habit than deliberate intentions to do you 
wrong. You pay what is due, and as your man 
merely rumbles internally when you turn away, you 
must be a very timid signorin, indeed, if you buy his 
content with any thing more. I fancy that all these 
things are now much better managed in Italy than 
in America, only we grumble at them there and 
stand them in silence at home. Every one can recall 
frightful instances of plunder, in which he was the 
victim, at New York — in which the robbery had 
none of the neatness of an operation, as it often has 
in Italy, but was a brutal mutilation. And then as 
regards civility from the same kind of people in the 
two countries, there is no comparison that holds in 
favor of us. All questions are readily and politely 
answered in Italian travel, and the servants of com- 
panies are required to be courteous to the public ; 
whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent snub 
from such people at home. 



ii. 

The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples 
was mild and warm as a May sun, though we were 
quite in the heart of November. We early strolled 
out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and 
drew near as we might to that restless, thronging, 
gossiping southern life, in contrast with which all 



CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 77 

northern existence seems only a sort of hibernation. 
. The long Toledo, on which the magnificence of mod- 
ern Naples is threaded, is the most brilliant and joy- 
ous street in the world ; but I think there is less of 
the quaintness of Italian civilization to be seen in its 
vivacious crowds than anywhere else in Italy. One 
easily understands how, with its superb length and 
straightness, and its fine, respectable, commonplace- 
looking houses, it should be the pride of a people 
fond of show ; but after Venice and Genoa it has no 
picturesque charm ; nay, even busy Milan seems less 
modern and more picturesque. The lines of the 
lofty palaces on the Toledo are seldom broken by 
the fa§ade of a church or other public edifice ; and 
when this does happen, the building is sure to be 
coldly classic or frantically baroque. 

You weary of the Toledo's perfect repair, of its 
monotonous iron balconies, its monotonous lofty win- 
dows ; and it would be insufferable if you could not 
turn out from it at intervals into one of those won- 
drous little streets which branch up on one hand and 
down on the other, rising and falling with flights of 
steps between the high, many-balconied walls. They 
ring all day with the motleyest life of fishermen, 
fruit-venders, chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every 
age and sex; and there is nothing so full of local 
color, unless it be the little up-and-down-hill streets 
in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets of Naples are 
only meant for foot-passengers, and a carriage never 
enters them ; but sometimes, if you are so blest, you 
may see a mule climbing the long stairways, moving 



78 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

solemnly under a stack of straw, or tinkling gayly 
down-stairs, bestridden by a swarthy, handsome peas- . 
ant — all glittering teeth and eyes and flaming 
Phrygian cap. The rider exchanges lively saluta- 
tions and sarcasms with the by-standers in his way, 
and perhaps brushes against the bagpipers who bray 
constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapol- 
itan costume, these pifferari, and have their legs in- 
comprehensibly tied up in the stockings and garters 
affected by the peasantry of the provinces, and wear 
brave red sashes about their waists. They are sim- 
ple, harmless-looking people, and would no doubt rob 
and kill in the most amiable manner, if brigandage 
came into fashion in their neighborhood. 

Sometimes the student of men may witness a Nea- 
politan quarrel in these streets, and may pick up use- 
ful ideas of invective from the remarks of the fat old 
women who always take part in the contests. But, 
though we were ten days in Naples, I only saw one 
quarrel, and I could have heard much finer violence 
of language among the gondoliers at any ferry in 
Venice than I heard in this altercation. 

The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in traffic. 
They sell a great deal, and very boisterously, the 
fruit of the cactus, which is about as large as an egg, 
and which they peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay 
out, a sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase. 
It is not good to the uncultivated taste ; but the 
stranger may stop and drink, with relish and refresh- 
ment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow, 
and sold at the little booths on the street-corners. 



CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 79 

These stands looks much like the shrines of the Ma- 
donna in other Italian cities, and a friend of ours was 
led, before looking carefully into their office, to argue 
immense Neapolitan piety from the frequency of their 
ecclesiastical architecture. They are, indeed, the 
shrines of a god much worshiped during the long 
Neapolitan summers ; and it was the profound theory 
of the Bourbon kings of Naples, that, if they kept 
their subjects well supplied with snow to cool their 
drink, there was no fear of revolution. It shows 
how liable statesmen are to err, that, after all, the 
Neapolitans rose, drove out the Bourbons, and wel- 
comed Garibaldi. 

The only part of the picturesque life of the side 
streets which seems ever to issue from them into the 
Toledo is the goatherd with his flock of milch-goats, 
which mingle with the passers in the avenues as fa- 
miliarly as with those of the alley, and thrust aside 
silk-hidden hoops, and brush against dandies' legs, in 
their course, but keep on perfect terms with every 
body. The goatherd leads the eldest of the flock, 
and the rest follow in docile order and stop as he 
stops to ask at the doors if milk is wanted. When 
he happens to have an order, one of the goats is 
haled, much against her will, into the entry of a 
house, and there milked, while the others wait out- 
side alone, nibbling and smelling thoughtfully about 
the masonry. It is noticeable that none of the good- 
natured passers seem to think these goats a great 
nuisance in the crowded street ; but all make way 
for them as if they were there by perfect right, and 
were no inconvenience. 



80 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

On the Toledo people keep upon the narrow side- 
walks, or strike out into the carriage-way, with an 
indifference to hoofs and wheels which one, after long 
residence in tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in view 
of the furious Neapolitan driving. That old compre- 
hensive gig of Naples, with which many pens and 
pencils have familiarized the reader, is nearly as hard 
to find there now as the lazzaroni, who have gone out 
altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quar- 
ters of the city, with its complement of twelve pas- 
sengers to one horse, distributed, two on each thill, 
four on the top seats, one at each side, and two be- 
hind ; but in the Toledo it has given place to much 
finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you any- 
where for half a franc, are the favorite means of 
public conveyance, and the private turn-outs are of 
every description and degree. Indeed, all the Nea- 
politans take to carriages, and the Strand in London 
at six o'clock in the evening is not a greater jam of 
wheels than the Toledo in the afternoon. Shopping 
feels the expansive influence of the out-of-doors life, 
and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open car- 
riages at the shop-doors, ministered to by the neat- 
handed shopmen. They are very languid ladies, as 
they recline upon their carriage cushions ; they are 
all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have 
gloomy rings about their fine eyes, like the dark- 
faced dandies who bow to them. This Neapolitan 
look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere 
in Italy ; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and 
comes, no doubt, from the peculiarly heavy growth 



CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 81 

of lashes which fringes the lower eyelid. Then there 
is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers 
are fierce and long. 

As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, 
the dandies of Naples are very gorgeous. If it is 
now, say, four o'clock in the afternotfn, they are all 
coming down the Toledo with the streams of car- 
riages bound for the long drive around the bay. But 
our foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful Villa 
Reale, between this course and the sea. The Villa 
is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile long ; it is rapt- 
ure to walk in it, and it comes, in description, to 
be a garden-grove, with feathery palms, Greekish 
temples, musical fountains, white statues of the gods, 
and groups of fair girls in spring silks. If I remem- 
ber aright, the sun is always setting on the bay, 
and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled 
by the water or the water is warmed by the golden 
light upon it, and upon the city, and upon all the 
soft mountain-heights around. 



in. 

Walking westward through the whole length of 
the Villa Reale, and keeping with the crescent shore 
of the bay, you come, after a while, to the Grot of 
Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for 
a carriage-way under the hill. It serves, however, 
the purpose of a grotto, if a grotto has any, and is 
of great length and dimness, and is all a-twinkle 
night and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking 
6 



82 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

the street which passes into it is the tomb of Virgil, 
and it is this you have come to see. To reach it, 
you knock first at the door of a blacksmith, who 
calls a species of custodian, and, when this latter has 
opened a gate in a wall, you follow him up-stairs into 
a market-garden. 

In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy 
shelter somewhat away from the vegetables, is the 
poet's tomb, which has a kind of claim to genuine • 
ness by virtue of its improbable appearance. It looks 
more like a bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs ; 
the masonry is antique, and is at least in skillful imi- 
tation of the fine Roman work. The interior is a 
small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling, 
under which a man may stand upright, and at the 
end next the street is a little stone commemorating 
the place as Virgil's tomb, which was placed there 
by the Queen of France in 1840, and said by the 
custodian (a singularly dull ass) to be an exact copy 
of the original, whatever the original may have been. 
This guide could tell us nothing more about it, and 
was too stupidly honest to pretend to know more. 
The laurel planted by Petrarch at the door of the 
tomb, and renewed in later times by Casimir Dela- 
vigne, has been succeeded by a third laurel. The 
present twig was so slender, and looked so friendless 
and unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the mem- 
ory of two poets could not be brought to rob it of 
one of its few leaves ; and we contented ourselves 
with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew 
abundantly on the roof of the tomb. 



CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 83 

There was a dusty quiet within the tomb, and a 
grassy quiet without, that pleased exceedingly ; but 
though the memories of the place were so high and 
epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken 
into that nook of hill-side verdure, made me think of a 
spring-house on some far-away Ohio farm ; a thought 
that, perhaps, would not have offended the poet, who 
loved and sang of humble country things, and, draw- 
ing wearily to his rest here, no doubt turned and 
remembered tenderly the rustic days before the ex- 
cellent veterans of Augustus came to exile him from 
his father's "farm at Mantua, and banish him to mere 
glory. But I believe most travellers have much 
nobler sensations in Virgil's tomb, and there is a 
great deal of testimony borne to their lofty sentiments 
on every scribbleable inch of its walls. Valery re- 
minded me that Boccaccio, standing near it of old, 
first felt his fate decided for literature. Did he come 
there, I wonder, with poor Fiammetta, and enter the 
tomb with her tender hand in his, before ever he 
thought of that cruel absence she tells of? " O 
donne pietose ! " I hope so, and that this pilgrimage, 
half of love and half of letters, took place, " nel 
tempo nel quale la rivestita terra piu che tutto l'altrq 
anno si mostra bella." 

If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naples- 
ward from the crest of the hill, you have the lovelir 
est view in the world of the sea and of the crescent 
beach, mightily jeweled at its further horn with the 
black Castel dell' Ovo. Fishermen's children are 
playing all along the foamy border of the sea, and 



84 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

boats are darting out into the surf. The present 
humble muse is not above saying also that the linen 
which the laundresses hang to dry upon lines along 
the beach takes the sun like a dazzling flight of white 
birds, and gives a breezy life to the scene whicli it 
could not spare. 

IV. 

There was a little church on our way back from 
Posilippo, into which we lounged a moment, pausing 
at the altar of some very successful saint near the 
door. Here there were great numbers of the usual 
offerings from the sick whom the saint had eased of 
their various ills, — waxen legs and arms from people 
who had been in peril of losing their limbs, as well 
as eyes, noses, fingers, and feet, and the crutches of 
those cured of lameness ; but we were most amused 
with the waxen effigies of several entire babies hung 
up about the altar, which the poor souls who had 
been near losing the originals had brought there in 
gratitude to the saint. 

Generally, however, the churches of Naples are 
not very interesting, and one who came away with- 
out seeing them would have little to regret. The 
pictures are seldom good, and though there are mag- 
nificent chapels in St. Januarius, and fine Gothic 
tombs at Santa Chiara, the architecture is usually 
rococo. I fancy that Naples has felt the damage 
of Spanish taste in such tilings as well as Spanish 
tyranny in others. Indeed, I saw much there which 



CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 85 

reminded me of what I had read about Spain rather 
than what I had seen in Italy ; and all Italian writ- 
ers are agreed in attributing the depravation of Na- 
ples to the long Spanish dominion. It is well known 
how the Spaniards rule their provinces, and their 
gloomy despotism was probably never more cruelly 
felt than in Italy, where the people were least able 
to bear it. I had a heart-felt exultation in walking 
through the quarter of the city where the tumults 
of Massaniello had raged, and, if only for a few days, 
struck mortal terror to the brutal pride of the vice- 
roy ; but I think I had a better sense of the immense 
retribution which has overtaken all memory of Span- 
ish rule in Naples as we passed through the palace 
of Capo di Monte. This was the most splendid seat 
of the Spanish Bourbon, whose family, inheriting its 
power from the violence of other times, held it with 
violence in these ; and in one of the chief saloons 
of the palace, which is now Victor Emanuel's, were 
pictures representing scenes of the revolution of 
1860, while the statuette of a Garibaldino, in his 
red shirt and all his heroic rudeness, was defiantly 
conspicuous on one of the tables. 



There was nothing else that pleased me as well in 
the palace, or in the grounds about it. These are all 
laid out in pleasant successions of grove, tangled wil- 
derness, and pasture-land, and were thronged, the 
Saturday afternoon of our visit, with all ranks of 



86 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

people, who strolled through the beautiful walks and 
enjoyed themselves in the peculiarly peaceful Italian 
way. Valery says that the Villa Reale in the Bour- 
bon time was closed, except for a single day in the 
year, to all but the nobles ; and that on this occasion 
it was filled with pretty peasant women, who made it 
a condition of their marriage bargains that their hus- 
bands should bring them to the Villa Reale on St. 
Mary's Day. It is now free to all on every day of 
the year, and the grounds of the Palace Capo di 
Monte are opened every Saturday. I liked the 
pleasant way in which sylvan Nature and Art had 
made friends in these beautiful grounds, in which 
Nature had consented to overlook even the foolish 
vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut and trimmed 
in formal and fantastic shapes, according to the taste 
of the silly times of bagwigs and patches. On every 
side wild birds fluttered through these absurd trees, 
and in the thickets lurked innumerable pheasants, 
which occasionally issued forth and stalked in stately, 
fearless groups over the sunset-crimsoned lawns. 
There was a brown gamekeeper for nearly every 
head of game, wearing a pheasant's wing in his hat 
and carrying a short, heavy sword ; and our driver 
told us, with an awful solemnity in his bated breath, 
that no one might kill this game but the king, under 
penalty of the galleys. 



CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 87 



VI. 

We went one evening to the opera at San Carlo. 
It is one of the three theatres — San Carlo of Na- 
ples, La Scala of Milan, and Fenice of Venice — 
on which the Italians pride themselves ; and it is 
certainly very large and imposing. The interior has 
a bel colpo d'occhio, which is what many Italians 
chiefly value in morals, manners, and architecture ; 
but after this comes great shabbiness of detail. The 
boxes, even of the first order, are paved with brick 
tiles, and the red velvet border of the box which the 
people see from, the pit is not supported in style by 
the seats within, which are merely covered with red 
oil-cloth. The opera we saw w r as also second-rate, 
and was to the splendor of the scenic arrangements 
what the oil-cloth was to the velvet. The house was 
full of people, but the dress of the audience was not 
so fine as we had expected in Naples. The evening 
dress is not de rigueur at Italian theatres, and people 
seemed to have come to San Carlo in any pleasant 
carelessness of costume. 



VII. 

The Italians are simple and natural folks, pleased 
through all their show of conventionality with little 
things, and as easy and unconscious as children in 
their ways. There happened to be a new caff£ 
opened in Naples while we were there, and we had 



00 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

the pleasure of seeing all ranks of people affected by 
its magnificence. Artless throngs blocked the side- 
walk day and night before its windows, gazing upon 
its mirrors, fountains, and frescos, and regarding the 
persons over their coffee within as beings lifted by 
sudden magic out of the common orbit of life and set 
dazzling in a higher sphere. All the waiters were 
uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding effect, and 
the head waiter was a majestic creature in a long 
blue coat reaching to his feet, and armed with a 
mighty silver-headed staff. This gorgeous apparition 
did nothing but walk up and down, and occasionally 
advance toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. 
At such times, however, before executing his pur- 
pose, he would glance round on the splendors they 
were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the 
enormous cruelty he had meditated in thinking to 
deprive them of the sight, would falter and turn 
away, leaving his intent unfulfilled. 



VIII. 

A DAY IN POMPEII. 
I. 

On the second morning after our arrival in Na- 
ples, we took the seven o'clock train, which leaves 
the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle of the 
Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Nea- 
politan bay almost the whole length of our journey, 
reached the railway station of Pompeii in an hour. 
As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw the 
fishing-boats go out, and the foamy waves (which it 
would be an insolent violence to call breakers) come 
in ; we saw the mountains slope their tawny and 
golden manes caressingly downward to the waters. 
w T here the islands were dozing yet ; and landward, 
on the left, we saw Vesuvius, with his brown mantle 
of ashes drawn close about his throat, reclining on 
the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morn- 
ing pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, 
lightly upward in the sunrise. 

We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods 
eastward through a little cotton-field, and found 
ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed, where we 
took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am 
sure it would have made an ancient Pompeian stir 



90 ITALIAN JOUKNEYS. 

in his urn to think of paying. But in Italy one 
learns the chief Italian virtue, patience, and we paid 
our account with the utmost good nature. There 
was compensation in store for us, and the guide 
whom we found at the gate leading up the little hill 
to Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance in favor of 
our happiness. He was a Roman, spoke Italian that 
Beatrice might have addressed to Dante, and was 
numbered Twenty-six. I suppose it is known that 
the present Italian Government forbids people to be 
pillaged in any way on its premises, and that the 
property of the State is no longer the traffic of cus- 
todians and their pitiless race. At Pompeii each 
person pays two francs for admission, and is rigorously 
forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to 
the guides. Ventisei (as w T e shall call him) himself 
pointed out one of these notices in English, and did 
his duty faithfully without asking or receiving fees in 
money. He was a soldier, like all the other guides, 
and was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a 
self-respect and dignity worthy of one of our own 
volunteer soldiers. 

Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us 
out of this living world through the Sea-gate of 
Pompeii back into the dead past — the past which, 
with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its 
intellectual power, I am not sorry to have dead, and, 
for the most part, buried. Our feet had hardly 
trodden the lava flagging of the narrow streets when 
we came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming 
the inanimate city. They were few in number, not 



A DAY IN POMPEII. 91 

perhaps a score, and they worked tediously, with 
baskets to carry away the earth from the excavation, 
boys and girls carrying the baskets, and several ath 
letic old women plying picks, while an overseer sat 
in a chair near by, and smoked, and directed their 
exertions. 

They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering 
the walls and pillars of the houses, and the mason, 
who is at hand, places little iron rivets in the stucco 
to prevent its fall where it is weak, while an artist 
attends to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they 
are exposed. The soil through which the excavation 
first passes is not of great depth ; the ashes which 
fell damp with scalding rain, in the second eruption, 
are perhaps five feet thick ; the rest is of that porous 
stone which descended in small fragments during the 
first eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this 
stone is always left untouched by the laborers till the 
day when the chief superintendent of the work comes 
out from Naples to see the last layers removed ; and 
it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the 
houses are uncovered, and the interesting and valu- 
able objects are nearly always found. 

The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work pro- 
ceeded, not that two thirds of Pompeii were yet 
buried, but that one third had been exhumed. We 
left these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into 
the Forum, stepping aside on the way to look into 
one of the Pompeian Courts of Common Pleas. 



92 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 



II. 

Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and 
surprise, that it would be unreasonable to express 
disappointment with Pompeii in fiction. And yet 1 
cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase 
in most writers and talkers who describe it had led 
me to expect much more than it was possible to find 
there. In my Pompeii I confess that the houses had 
no roofs — in fact, the rafters which sustained the 
tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in ? 
But otherwise my Pompeii was a very complete 
affair : the walls all rose to their full height ; door- 
ways and arches were perfect ; the columns were all 
unbroken and upright ; putting roofs on my Pompeii, 
you might have lived in it very comfortably. The 
real Pompeii is different. It is seldom that any wall 
is unbroken ; most columns are fragmentary ; and 
though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few 
rooms in the city are perfect in form, and the whole 
is much more ruinous than I thought. 

But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappoint- 
ment at its greatness overcome, there is endless ma- 
terial for study, instruction, and delight. It is the 
revelation of another life, and the utterance of the 
past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the 
world. Indeed, I think that the true friend of Pom- 
peii should make it a matter of conscience, on enter- 
ing the enchanted city, to cast out of his knowledge 
all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and 



A DAY IN POMPEII. 93 

travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town's 
luxurious life and agonizing death, with such inci- 
dents of the eruption as he can remember from the 
description of Pliny. These are the spells to which 
the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought 
you can rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to 
be a valet de place of the fiirst century, and your- 
selves a set of blond barbarians to whom he is show- 
ing off the splendors of one of the most brilliant 
towns of the empire of Titus. Those sad furrows 
in the pavement become vocal with the joyous rattle 
of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you prudently 
step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by 
the little shops of wine, and grain, and oil, with 
which the thrifty voluptuaries of Pompeii flanked 
their street-doors. The counters of these shops run 
across their fronts, and are pierced with round holes 
on the top, through which you see dark depths of 
oil in the jars below, and not sullen lumps of ashes ; 
those stately amphorce behind are full of wine, and in 
the corners are bags of wheat. 

" This house, with a shop on either side, whose is 
it, XXVI. ? " 

" It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. 
Would you like his autograph ? I know one of his 
slaves who would sell it." 

You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you 
pass by, for people in Pompeii have not much to do, 
and, besides, a Briton is not an every- day sight there, 
as he will be one of these centuries. The skins of 
wild beasts are little worn in Pompeii ; and those 



94 J ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

bold-eyed Roman women think it rather odd that we 
should like to powder our shaggy heads with brick- 
dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, 
for our part, cannot repress .a feeling of disgust at 
the loungers in the street, who, XXVI. tells us, are 
all going to soak themselves half the day in the 
baths yonder ; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing 
more offensive than another to our savage sense of 
propriety, it is the personal cleanliness of the inhab- 
itants. We little know what a change for the better 
will be wrought in these people with the lapse of 
time, and that they will yet come to wash themselves 
but once a year, as we do. 

(The reader may go on doing this sort of thing 
at some length for himself; and may imagine, if he 
pleases, a boastful conversation among the Pompeians 
at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agric- 
ola has broken the backbone of a rebellion in Brit- 
ain ; and in which all the speakers begin their ob- 
servations with " Ho ! my Lepidus ! " and " Ha ! 
my Diomed ! " In the mean time we return to the 
present day, and step down the Street of Plenty 
along with Ventisei.) 

in. 

It is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the 
principal temples in Pompeii (such as those of Jupi- 
ter and Venus), to cross the fields that cover a great 
breadth of the buried city, and look into the amphi- 
theatre, where, as every body knows, the lions had 



A DAY IN POMPEII. 95 

no stomach for Glaucus on the morning of the fatal 
eruption. The fields are now planted with cotton, 
and of course we thought those commonplaces about 
the wonder the Pompeians would feel could they 
come back to see that New- World plant growing 
above their buried homes. We might have told 
them, the day of our visit, that this cruel , plant, so 
long watered with the tears of slaves, and fed with 
the blood of men, was now an exile from its native 
fields, where war was plowing with sword and shot 
the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest fibres of 
the oppression in which cotton had grown king. And 
the ghosts of wicked old Pompeii, remembering the 
manifold sins that called the fires of hell to devour 
her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest wit- 
ness of God's unforgetting justice, might well have 
shuddered, through all their shadow, to feel how 
terribly He destroys the enemies of Nature and man. 
But the only Pompeian presences which haunted 
our passage of the cotton-field were certain small 

" Phantoms of delight/' 

with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran 
before us and plucked the bolls of the cotton and 
sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and white 
grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our ex- 
cellencies ; and there was some doubt of the cur- 
rency of the coin which we gave these poor children 
in return. 

There are now but few peasants living on the land 
over the head of Pompeii, and the Government al- 



96 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

lows no sales of real estate to be made except to 
itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly 
be said to own their possessions, for they are merely 
allowed to cultivate the soil. A guard stationed 
night and day prevents them from making excava- 
tions, and they are severely restricted from entering 
the excavated quarters of the city alone. 

The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet 
interred : happy the generation that lives to learn 
the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre ! For, when 
you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the 
past takes deeper hold on your imagination than any 
living city, and becomes and is the metropolis of your 
dreamland forever. O marvelous city ! who shall 
reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not 
death, something not life — something that is the one 
when you turn to determine its essence as the other ! 
What is it comes to me at this distance of that which 
I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but 
not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Nea- 
politan November falling into them, or clouding their 
w T heel-worn lava with the black, black shadows of the 
many-tinted walls ; the houses, and the gay columns 
of white, yellow, and red ; the delicate pavements of 
mosaic ; the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead foun- 
tains ; inanimate garden spaces with pygmy statues 
suited to their littleness ; suites of fairy bed-cham- 
bers, painted with exquisite frescos ; dining - halls 
with joyous scenes of hunt and • banquet on their 
walls ; the ruinous sites of temples ; the melancholy 
emptiness of booths and shops and jolly drinking- 



A DAY IN POMPEII. 97 

houses ; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern 
Pompeian drawing water from a well there ; the baths 
with their roofs perfect yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs 
all but unharmed ; around the whole, the city wall 
crowned with slender poplars ; outside the gates, the 
long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretch- 
ing on to StabiaB ; and, in the distance, Vesuvius, 
brown and bare, w T ith his fiery breath scarce visible 
against the cloudless heaven; — these are the things 
that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at 
myself walking those enchanted streets, and to won- 
der if I could ever have been so blest. 

For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like 
Pompeii. 

The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after 
our stroll across the cotton-fields, was' small, like the 
vastest things in Pompeii, and had nothing of the 
stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor 
any thing of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and 
ruinous grandeur. But its littleness made it all the 
more comfortable and social, and, seated upon its 
benches under a cool awning, one could have almost 
chatted across the arena with one's friends ; could 
have witnessed the spectacle on the sands without 
losing a movement of the quick gladiators, or an 
agony of the victim given to the beasts — which must 
have been very delightful to a Pompeian of compan- 
ionable habits and fine feelings. It is quite impossi- 
ble, however, that the bouts described by Bulwer as 
taking place all at the same time on the arena should 
really have done so : the combatants would have 
7 



98 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

rolled and tumbled and trampled over each other an 
hundred times in the narrow space. 

Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor 
little amphitheatre has kept only an echo. But this 
echo is one of the most perfect ever heard : prompt, 
clear, startling, it blew back the light chaff we threw 
to it with amazing vehemence, and almost made us 
doubt if it were not a direct human utterance. Yet 
how was Ventisei to know our names ? And there 
was no one else to call them but ourselves. Our 
" dolce duca " gathered a nosegay -from the crum- 
bling ledges, and sat down in the cool of the once- 
cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for 
the ladies. When we had wearied ourselves with 
the echo he arose and led us back into Pompeii. 



IV. 

The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are 
alike : the entrance-room next the door ; the parlor 
or drawing-room next that ; then the impluvium^ or 
unroofed space in the middle of the house, where the 
rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and 
where the household used to come to wash itself, 
primitively, as at a pump ; the little garden, with its 
painted columns, behind the impluvium, and, at last, 
the dining-room. There are minute bed-chambers 
on either side, and, as I said, a shop at one side in 
front, for the sale of the master's grain, wine, and 
oil. The pavements of all the houses are of mosaic, 
which, in the better sort, is very delicate and beauti- 



A DAY IN POMPEII. 99 

fill, and is found sometimes perfectly uninjured. An 
^exquisite pattern, often repeated, is a ground of tiny 
cubes of white marble with dots of black dropped reg- 
ularly into it. Of course there were many pictur- 
esque and fanciful designs, of which the best have 
been removed to the Museum in Naples ; but sev- 
eral good ones are still left, and (like that of the 
Wild Boar) give names to the houses in which 
they are found. 

But, after all, the great wonder, the glory, of these 
Pompeian houses is in their frescos. If I tried to 
give an idea of the luxury of color in Pompeii, the 
most gorgeous adjectives would be as poorly able to 
reproduce a vivid and glowing sense of those hues 
as the photography which now copies the drawing 
of the decorations ; so I do not try. 

I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, 
let the reader please to consider : A workman nearly 
two thousand years laying upon the walls those soft 
lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs, nymphs 
and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses ; and get- 
ting weary and lying down to sleep, and dreaming 
of an eruption of the mountain ; of the city buried 
under a fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of ashes 
seventeen centuries ; then of its being slowly ex- 
humed, and, after another lapse of years, of some one 
coming to gather the shadow of that dreamer's work 
upon a plate of glass, that he might infinitely repro- 
duce it and sell it to tourists at from five francs to 
fifty centimes a copy — I say, consider such a dream 
dreamed in the hot heart of the day, after certail 



100 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

cups of Vesuvian wine ! What a piece of Katzen* 
jammer (I can use no milder term) would that work- 
man think it when he woke again ! Alas ! what is 
history and the progress of the arts and sciences but 
one long Katzenjammer ! 

Photography cannot give, any more than I, the 
colors of the frescos, but it can do the drawing better, 
and, I suspect, the spirit also. I used the word work- 
man, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration 
of the w r alls, for in most cases the painter was only 
an artisan, and did his work probably by the yard, as 
the artisan who paints walls and ceilings in Italy does 
at this day. But the old workman did his work 
much more skillfully and tastefully than the modern 
— threw on expanses of mellow color, delicately 
paneled off the places for the scenes, and penciled 
in the figures and draperies (there are usually more 
of the one than the other) with a deft hand. Of 
course, the houses of the rich were adorned by men 
of talent ; but it is surprising to see the community 
of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be 
from cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are 
nearly always chosen from the fables of the gods, and 
they are in illustration of the poets, Homer and the 
rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which people 
led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, 
and sometimes not too chaste ; there is much of Bac- 
chus and Ariadne, much of Venus and Adonis, and 
Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs, — not to 
mention frequent representations of the toilet of that 
beautiful monster which the lascivious art of the time 



A DAY IN POMPEII. 101 

loved to depict. One of the most pleasing of all the 
scenes is that in one of the houses, of the Judgment 
of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank 
in an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, 
with one leg carelessly crossing the other, and both 
hands resting lightly on his shepherd's crook, while 
the goddesses before him await his sentence. Nat- 
urally the painter has done his best for the victress 
in this rivalry, and you see 

" Idalian Aphrodite beautiful," 

as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice 
of girlish resentment in her attitude, that Paris should 
pause for an instant, which is altogether delicious. 

" And I beheld great Here's angry eyes." 

Awful eyes ! How did the painter make them ? The 
wonder of all these pagan frescos is the mystery of 
the eyes — still, beautiful, unhuman. You cannot be- 
lieve that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and 
women to do evil, they look so calm and so uncon- 
scious in it all ; and in the presence of the celestials, 
as they bend upon you those eternal orbs, in whose 
regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here 
art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words 
in literature which give a sense (nothing gives the 
idea) of the stare of these gods, except that magnifi- 
cent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance over 
the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and un- 
sympathizing Nereids. They floated slowly up, and 
their eyes 

' Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house of the 
idols." 



102 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of 
Paris are still so fresh and bright, that it photographs 
very well, but there are other frescos wherein there 
is more visible perfection of line, but in which the 
colors are so dim that they can only be reproduced 
by drawings. One of these is the Wounded Adonis 
cared for by Venus and the Loves ; in which the 
story is treated with a playful pathos wonderfully 
charming. The fair boy leans in the languor of his 
hurt toward Venus, who sits utterlv disconsolate be- 
side him, while the Cupids busy themselves with such 
slight surgical offices as Cupids may render : one pre- 
pares a linen bandage for the wound, another wraps 
it round the leg of Adonis, another supports one of 
his heavy arms, another finds his own emotions too 
much for him and pauses to weep. It is a pity that 
the colors of this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, 
and a greater pity that most of the other frescos in 
Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away. The 
hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, 
and the ashes washed from the pictures, but then the 
malice of the elements begins anew, and rain and sun 
draw the life out of tints which- the volcano failed to 
obliterate. In nearly all cases they could be pre- 
served by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is 
a wonder that the Government does not take this 
slight trouble to save them. 

Among the frescos which told no story but their 
own, we were most pleased with one in a delicately 
painted little bed - chamber. This represented an 
alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pro- 



A DAY IN POMPEII. 103 

nounced The Belated Husband, opening a door with 
a night-latch. Nothing could have been better than 
this miserable wretch's cowardly haste and cautious 
noiselessness in applying his key ; apprehension sat 
upon his brow, confusion dwelt in his guilty eye. 
He had been out till two o'clock in the morning, 
electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people 
(" Pansa, and Roman gladiators," " Pansa, and 
Christians to the Beasts," was the platform), and he 
had left his placens uxor at home alone with the 
children, and now within this door that placens uxor 
awaited him ! 

v. 

You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a 
year or two since, in making an excavation in a 
Pompeian street, the molds of four human bodies, 
three women and a man, who fell down, blind and 
writhing, in the storm of fire eighteen hundred years 
ago ; whose shape the settling and hardening ashes 
took ; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay 
there in the hollow of the matrix till the cunning of 
this time found them, and, pouring liquid plaster 
round the skeletons, clothed them with human form 
again, and drew them forth into the world once more. 
There are many things in Pompeii which bring back 
the gay life of the city, but nothing which so vividly 
reports the terrible manner of her death as these effi- 
gies of the creatures that actually shared it. The 
man in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his 
back, and taken his doom sturdily — there is a sub- 



104 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

lime calm in his rigid figure. The women lie upon 
their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their 
drapery tangled and heaped. about them, and in 
every fibre you see how hard they died. One presses 
her face into her handkerchief to draw one last 
breath unmixed with scalding steam ; another's arms 
are wildly thrown abroad to clutch at help ; another's 
hand is appealingly raised, and on her slight fingers 
you see the silver hoops with which her poor dead 
vanity adorned them. 

The guide takes you aside from the street into the 
house where they lie, and a dreadful shadow drops 
upon your heart as you enter their presence. With- 
out, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole 
sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city 
to send up the tumult of her despair. 

What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after 
this ? The long street of tombs outside the walls ? 
Those that died before the city's burial seem to have 
scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death. 

Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through 
the freedman's long underground vaults, where his 
friends thought to be safe, and were smothered in 
heaps ? The garden-ground grows wild among its 
broken columns with weeds and poplar saplings ; in 
one of the corridors they sell photographs, on which, 
if you please, Ventisei has his bottle, or drink- 
money. So we escape from the doom of the ca- 
lamity, and so, at last, the severely forbidden buona- 
mano is paid. A dog may die many deaths besides 
choking with butter. 



A DAY IN POMPEII. 105 

We return slowly through the city, where we have 
spent the whole day, from nine till four o'clock. We 
linger on the way, imploring Ventisei if there is 
not something to be seen in this or that house ; we 
make our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and 
cannot rend ourselves from the bliss of being in 
Pompeii. 

At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to 
come again many times w r hile in Naples, and never 
go again. 

Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great 
happiness. 



IX. 

A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 
I. 

The road from Naples to Herculaneuni is, in fact, 
one long street ; it hardly ceases to be city in Naples 
till it is town at Portici, and in the interval it is 
suburb, running between palatial lines of villas, 
which all have their names ambitiously painted over 
their doors. Great part of the distance this street is 
bordered by the bay, and, as far as this is the case, it 
is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to marine 
life in Italy. Sea-faring people go lounging up and 
down among the fishermen's boats drawn up on the 
shore, and among the fishermen's wives making nets, 
while the fishermen's children play and clamber 
everywhere, and over all flap and flutter the clothes 
hung on poles to dry. In this part of the street 
there are, of course, oysters, and grapes, and oranges, 
and cactus-pulps, and cutlery, and iced drinks to sell 
at various booths ; and Commerce is exceedingly 
dramatic and boisterous over the bargains she of- 
fers ; and equally, of course, murderous drinking 
shops lurk at intervals along the pavement, and lure 
into their recesses mariners of foreign birth, briefly 
ashore from their ships. The New York Coffee 



A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 107 

House is there to attract my maritime fellow-coun- 
trymen, and I know that if I look into that place 
of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces 
Hushed with drink, and with the excitement of buy- 
ing the least they can for the most money. Poor 
souls ! they shall drink that pleasant morning away 
in the society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, 
and at midnight, emptied of every soldo, shall arise, 
wrung with a fearful suspicion of treachery, and wan- 
der away under Antonino's guidance to seek the pro- 
tection of the Consul ; or, taking the law into their 
own hands, shall proceed to clean out, more Ameri- 
cano, the New York Coffee House, when Antonino 
shall develop into one of the landlords, and deal them 
the most artistic stab in Naples : handsome, worthy 
Antonino ; tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless ! 



n. 

Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay 
and its seafaring life, it enters, between the walls of 
lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of maccaroni haunted 
by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There 
were few people to be seen on the street, but through 
the open doors of the lofty fly-blown houses we saw 
floury legions at work making maccaroni ; grinding 
maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it in mighty 
skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and put- 
ting it away. By the frequency of the wine-shops 
we judged that the legions were a thirsty host, and 
by the number of the barber-surgeons' shops, that 



108 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

they were a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The 
latter shops were in the proportion of one to five of 
the former ; and the artist who had painted their 
signs had indulged his fancy in wild excesses of phle- 
botomy. We had found that, as we came south 
from Venice, science grew more and more sanguin- 
ary in Italy, and more and more disposed to let 
blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to 
be manifest on the barbers' signs, which displayed 
the device of an arm lanced at the elbow, and jetting 
the blood by a neatly described curve into a tum- 
bler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed 
at the wrist also ; and at Naples an exhaustive treat- 
ment of the subject appeared, the favorite study of 
the artist being to represent a nude figure reclining 
in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant green- 
sward, and bleeding from the elbows, wrists, hands, 
ankles, and feet. 

in. 

In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the 
great number of English names which appear on 
business houses, but it was entirely bewildering to 
read a bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on 
this road : " This Desirable Property for Sale." I 
should scarcely have cared to buy that desirable 
property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a fa- 
vorite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, 
nearly the whole way to Portici. Those which stood 
with their gardens toward the bay would have been 
tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their 



A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 109 

windows shut to the vile street before their doors; 
but the houses opposite could have had no escape 
from its stench and noisomeness. It was absolutely 
the filthiest street I have seen anywhere outside of 
New York, excepting only that little street which, in 
Herculaneum, leads from the theatre to the House 
of Argo. 

This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water 
in its centre, bordered by begging children, and is 
either fouler or cleaner for the water, but I shall 
never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or 
sixty feet below the elevation on which the present 
city of Portici is built, and is part of the excavation 
made long ago to reach the plain on which Hercula- 
neum stands, buried under its half-score of successive 
layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the 
aid of all the virtuous poverty and leisure of the 
modern town — there was a vast deal of both, we 
found — in our search for the staircase by which you 
descend to the classic plain, and it proved a dis- 
covery involving the outlay of all the copper coin 
about us, while the sight of the famous theatre of 
Herculaneum was much more expensive than it 
would have been had we come there in the old time 
to see a play of Plautus or Terence. 

As for the theatre, " the large and highly orna- 
mented theatre " of which I read, only a little while 
ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by the light 
of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the 
general complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. 
It was never perfectly dug out of the lava, and, as is 



110 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

known, it was filled up in the last century, together 
with other excavations, when they endangered the 
foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am 
amused to find myself so hot upon the poor prop- 
erty-holders of Portici. I suppose I should not my- 
self, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowl- 
edge of classic civilization, like to have my house 
tumbled about my ears.) But though it was im- 
possible in the theatre of Herculaneum to gain any 
idea of its size or richness, I remembered there the 
magnificent bronzes which had been found in it, and 
did a hasty reverence to the place. Indeed, it is 
amazing, when one sees how small a part of Hercu- 
laneum has been uncovered, to consider the number 
of fine works of art in the Museo Borbonico which 
were taken thence, and which argue a much richer 
and more refined community than that of Pompeii. 
A third of the latter city has now been restored to 
the light of day ; but though it has yielded abun- 
dance of all the things that illustrate the domestic 
and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those 
old times, and has given the once secret rooms of the 
museum their worst attraction, it still falls far below 
Herculaneum in the value of its contributions to the 
treasures of classic art, except only in the variety and 
beauty of its exquisite frescos. 

The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagina- 
tion of the visitor to that degree that nothing short 
of the instant destruction of Portici and the exca- 
vation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the 
opening of one theatre, and the uncovering of a 



A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. Ill 

basilica and two or three houses, have given such 
richness to us, what delight and knowledge would 
not the removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and 
lava bestow ! 

Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, 
the visitor extinguishes his candle with a pathetic 
sigh, profusely rewards the custodian (whom he con- 
nects in some mysterious way with the ancient popu- 
lation of the injured city about him), and, thought- 
fully removing the tallow from his fingers, follows the 
course of the vile stream already sung, and soon ar- 
rives at the gate opening into the exhumed quarter 
of Herculaneum. And there he finds a custodian 
w r ho enters perfectly into his feelings ; a custodian 
who has once been a guide in Pompeii, but now de- 
spises that wretched town, and would not be guide 
there for any money since he has known the supe- 
rior life of Herculaneum ; who, in fine, feels toward 
Pompeii as a Bostonian feels toward New York. Yet 
the reader would be wrong to form the idea that 
there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. 
On the contrary, he is one of the best-natured men 
in the world. He is a mighty mass of pinguid 
bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, 
and he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of 
manner on the ruins, contradicting all our guesses at 

things with a sw T eet " Perdoni, signori ! ma ." At 

the end, we find that he has some medallions of lava 
to sell : there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the 
partita d'azione, there is Garibaldi ; both warm yet 
from the craterof Vesuvius, and of the same material 



112 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

which destroyed Herculaneum. We decline to buy, 
and the custodian makes the national shrug and 
grimace (signifying that we are masters of the situa- 
tion, and that he washes his hands of the consequence 
of our folly) on the largest scale that we have ever 
seen : his mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his 
great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown back 
to bring his face on a level with his chin. The effect 
is tremendous, but we nevertheless feel that he loves 
us the same. 

IV. 

The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum 
was in melancholy contrast to the day we spent in 
Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened 
into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, 
blue sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second 
draught of the spirit of the past had not only some- 
thing of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather 
a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There 
was so little of Herculaneum : only a few hundred 
yards square are exhumed, and we counted the 
houses easilv on the finders of one hand, leaving the 
thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with 
its flagging of lava and narrow border of foot-walks, 
lay between ; and though the custodian, apparently 
moved at our dejection, said that the excavation was 
to be resumed the very next week, the assurance 
did little to restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I 
fancy that these old cities must needs be seen in the 
sunshine by those who would feel what gay lives 



A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 113 

they once led ; by dimmer light they are very sullen 
spectres, and their doom still seems to brood upon 
them. I know that even Pompeii could not have 
been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there 
was to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant 
with colors as any thing in the former city. Nay, I 
believe that the tints of the frescos and painted col- 
umns were even brighter, and that the walls of the 
houses were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. 
But no house was wholly freed from lava, and the 
little street ran at the rear of the buildings which 
were supposed to front on some grander avenue not 
yet exhumed. It led down, as the custodian pre- 
tended, to a wharf, and he showed an iron ring in 
the wall of the House of Argo, standing at the end 
of the street, to which, he said, his former fellow- 
citizens used to fasten their boats, though it was all 
dry enough there now. 

There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more 
ambitious domestic architecture than seems to have 
been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan of the 
houses in the two cities is alike ; but in the former 
there was often a second story, as was proven by the 
charred ends of beams still protruding from the 
walls, while in the latter there is only one house 
which is thought to have aspired to a second floor. 
The House of Argo is also much larger than any in 
Pompeii, and its appointments were more magnifi- 
cent. Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely 
Greek town we felt an atmosphere of better taste in 
every thing than prevailed in the fashionable Roman 



1!4 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

watering-place, though this, too, was a summer resort 
of the " best society " of the empire. The mosaic 
pavements were exquisite, and the little bed-cham- 
bers daintv and delicious in their decorations. The 
lavish delight in color found expression in the vividest 
hues upon the walls, and not only were the columns 
of the garden painted, but the foliage of the capitals 
was variously tinted. The garden of the House of 
Argo was vaster than any of the classic world which 
we had yet seen, and was superb with a long colon- 
nade of unbroken columns. Between these and the 
-walls of the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, 
and in the midst once stood marble tables, under 
which the workmen exhuming the city found certain 
crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining- 
room, of course, and painted on the wall was a lady 
with a parasol. 

I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the 
profusion of flowers growing wild in this garden gave 
it a yet more tender and pathetic charm. Here- — 
where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and 
perished in the terrible blossoming of the mountain 
that sent up its fires in the awful similitude of Na- 
ture's harmless and lovely forms, and showered its 
destroying petals all abroad — was it not tragic to 
find again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the 
sweet perfumes of the earth's immortal life ? Of 
them that planted and tended and plucked and bore 
in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile 
children of the summer, what witness in the world? 
Only the crouching skeletons under the tables. Alas 
and alas ! 



A HALF^HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 115 



V. 

The skeletons went with us throughout Hercula- 
neum, and descended into the cell, all green with 
damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and 
manacled in the place of those found there beside 
the big bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to 
cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of it 
was ! If we had really seen this kettle and the 
skeletons there — as we did not — we could not have 
suffered more tjian we did. They took all the life 
out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his 
pretty little domestic temple to the Penates, and this 
was all there was left in Herculaneum to see. 

" Is there nothing else ? " we demand of the cus- 
todian. 

" Signori, this is all." 

"It is mighty little." 

" Perdoni, signori ! ma ." 

" Well," we say sourly to each other, glancing 
round at the walls of the pit, on the bottom of which 
the bit of city stands, "it is a good thing to know 
that Herculaneum amounts to nothing." 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 



I have no doubt 

•' Calm Capri waits/' 

where we left it. in the Gulf of Salerno, for any trav- 
eller who may choose to pay it a visit ; but at the 
time we were there we felt that it was on exhibition 
for that day only, and would, when we departed, dis- 
appear in its sapphire sea, and be no more ; just as 
Niagara ceases to play as soon as your back is turned, 
and Venice goes out like a pyrotechnic display, and 
all marvelously grand and lovely things make haste 
to prove their impermanence. 

We delayed some days in Xaples in hopes of fine 
weather, and at last chose a morning that was warm 
and cloudy at nine o'clock, and burst into frequent 
passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon. 
The first half of the journey was made by rail, and 
brought us to Castellamare, whence we took carriage 
for Sorrento, and oranges, and rapture, — winding 
along the steep shore of the sea, and under the brows 
of wooded hills that rose high above us into the misty 
weather, and caught here and there the sunshine on 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 117 

their tops. In that heavenly climate no day can 
long be out of humor, and at Sorrento we found 
ours very pleasant, and rode delightedly through the 
devious streets, looking up to the terraced orange- 
groves on one hand, and down to the terraced orange- 
groves on the other, until at a certain turning of the 
way we encountered Antonino Occhio d'Argento, 
whom fate had appointed to be our boatman to Capri. 
We had never heard of Antonino before, and indeed 
had intended to take a boat from one of the hotels ; 
but when this corsair offered us his services, there 
was that guile in his handsome face, that cunning in 
his dark eyes, that heart could not resist, and we 
halted our carriage and took him at once. 

He kept his boat in one of those caverns which 
honey-comb the cliff under Sorrento, and afford a 
natural and admirable shelter for such small craft as 
may be dragged up out of reach of the waves, and 
here I bargained with him before finally agreeing to 
go with him to Capri. In Italy it is customary for a 
public carrier when engaged to give his employer as 
a pledge the sum agreed upon for the service, which 
is returned with the amount due him, at the end, if 
the service has been satisfactory ; and I demanded of 
Antonino this eaparra, as it is called. " What ca* 
parra? " said he, lifting the lid of his wicked eye with 
his forefinger; " this is the best caparraj* meaning a 
face as honest and trustworthy as the devil's. The 
stroke confirmed my subjection to Antonino, and I 
took his boat without further parley, declining even 
to feel the muscle of his boatmen's arms, which he ex- 



118 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

posed to niy touch in evidence that they were strong 
enough to row us swiftly to Capri. The men were 
but two in number, but they tossed the boat lightly 
into the surf, and then lifted me aboard, and rowed 
to the little pier from which the ladies and T. 
g : in. 

The sun shone, the water danced and sparkled, 
and presently we raised our sail, and took the gale 
that blew for Capri — an oblong height rising ten 
miles beyond out of the heart of the azure gulf. On 
the way thither there was little interest but that of 
natural beauty in the bold, picturesque coast we 
skirted for some distance : though on one mighty 
rock there were the ruins of a seaward-looking Tem- 
ple of Hercules, with arches of the unmistakable 
Roman masonry, below which the receding waves 
rushed and poured over a jetting ledge in a thun- 
derous cataract. 

Antonino did his best to entertain us, and lect- 
ured us unceasingly upon his virtue and his wisdom, 
dwelling greatly on the propriety and good policy 
of always speaking the truth. This spectacle of ve- 
racity became intolerable after a while, and I was 
goaded to * Oh then, if you never tell lies, 

expect to go to Paradis w Not at all/' answered 

Antonino compassionately, " for I have sinned much. 
But the lie d go ahead :anti), added 

this Machiavelli of boatmen ; yet I think he was 
mistaken, for he deceived us with perfect ease and 
admiral . All along, he had pretended that 

visit the Blue Grotto, and return 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 119 

that day ; but as we drew near the island, painful 
doubts began to trouble him, and he feared the sea 
would be too rough for the Grotto part of the affair. 
" But there will be an old man," he said, with a sub- 
tile air of prophecy, " waiting for us on the beach. 
This old man is oue of the Government guides to the 
Grotto, and he will say whether it is to be seen to- 
day." 

And certainly there was the old man on the beach 
— a short patriarch, with his baldness covered by a 
kind of bloated wollen sock — a blear-eyed sage, and 
a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward 
the boat, and when we asked him whether the 
Grotto was to be seen, he paused knee- deep in the 
water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as I shall 
always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, 
threw back his head a little, brought his hand to his. 
cheek, expanded it, and said, " No ; to-day, no ! To- 
morrow, yes ! " Antonino leaped joyously ashore, 
and delivered us over to the old man, to be guided 
to the Hotel di Londra, while he drew his boat upon 
the land. He had reason to be contented, for this 
artifice of the patriarch of Capri relieved him from 
the necessity of verifying to me the existence of an 
officer of extraordinary powers in the nature of a 
consul, who, he said, would not permit boats to leave 
Capri for the main-land after five o'clock in the even- 
ing. 

When it was decided that we should remain on 
the island till' the morrow, we found so much time on 
our hands, after bargaining for our lodging at the 



120 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the 
mountain to the ruins of the palaces of Tiberius, and 
to this end we contracted for the services of certain 
of the inuletresses that had gathered about the inn- 
gate, clamorously offering their beasts. The mule- 
tresses chosen were a matron of mature years and 
of a portly habit of body ; her daughter, a mere 
child; and her niece, a very pretty girl of eighteen, 
with a voice soft and sweet as a bird's. They placed 
the ladies, one on each mule, and then, while the 
mother and daughter devoted themselves to the 
hind-quarters of the foremost animal, the lovely niece 
brought up the rear of the second beast, and the 
patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged behind. 
So the cavalcade ascended ; first, from the terrace of 
the hotel overlooking the bit of shipping village on 
•the beach, and next from the town of Capri, clinging 
to the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky, until 
at last it reached the heights on which the ruins 
stand. Our way was through narrow lanes, bordered 
by garden walls ; then through narrow streets bor- 
dered by dirty houses ; and then again by gardens, 
but now of a better sort than the first, and belong- 
ing to handsome villas. 

On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheer- 
fully, and our patriarch gloomily, and between the 
two we accumulated a store of information concerning 
the present inhabitants of Capri, which, I am sorry 
to say, has now for the most part failed me. I re- 
member that they said most of the land-owners at 
Capri were Neapolitans, and that these villas were 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 121 

their country-houses ; though they pointed out one 
of the stateliest of the edifices as belonging to a 
certain English physician who had come to visit 
Capri for a few days, and had now been living on the 
island twenty years, having married (said the mule- 
tress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the town. 
From this romance — something like which the 
muletress seemed to think might well happen con- 
cerning herself — we passed lightly to speak of 
kindred things, the muletress responding gayly be- 
tween the blows she bestowed upon her beast. The 
accent of these Capriotes has something of German 
harshness and heaviness : they say non bosso instead 
of non posso, and monto instead of rnondo, and inter- 
change the t and d a good deal ; and they use for 
father the Latin pater, instead of padre. But this 
girl's voice, as I said, was very musical, and the 
island's accent was sweet upon her tongue. 

I. — What is your name ? 

She. — Caterina, little sir (signorin) . 

I. — And how old are you, Caterina ? 

She. — Eighteen, little sir. 

I. — And you are betrothed ? 

She feigns not to understand ; but the patriarch, 
who has dropped behind to listen to our discourse, 
explains, — " He asks if you are in love." 

She. — Ah, no ! little sir, not yet. 

I. — No ? A little late, it seems to me. I think 
there must be some good-looking youngster who 
pleases you — no ? 

She. — Ah, no! one must work, one cannot think 



122 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

of marrying. We are four sisters, and we have only 
the buonamano from hiring these mules, and we must 
spin and cook. 

The Patriarch. — Don't believe her ; she has two 
lovers. 

She. — Ah, no ! It is n't true. He tells a fib — he ! 

But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to be accused 
of lovers, — such is the guile of the female heart in 
Capri, — and laughed over the patriarch's wickedness. 
She confided that she ate maccaroni once a day, and 
she talked constantly of eating it just as the North- 
ern Italians always talk of polenta. She was a true 
daughter of the isle, and had never left it but once 
in her life, when she went to Naples. " Naples was 
beautiful, yes ; but one always loves one's own coun- 
try the best." She was very attentive and good, 
but at the end was rapacious of more and more 
buonamano. " Have patience with her, sir," said 
the blameless Antonino, who witnessed her greedi- 
ness ; " they do not understand certain matters here, 
poor little things ! " 

As for the patriarch, he w T as full of learning rela- 
tive to himself and to Capri ; and told me with much 
elaboration that the islanders lived chiefly by fishing, 
and gained something also by their vineyards. But 
they were greatly oppressed by taxes, and the strict 
enforcement of the conscriptions, and they had little 
love for the Italian Government, and wished tho 
Bourbons back again. The Piedmontese, indeed, 
misgoverned them horribly. There was the Blue 
Grotto, for example : formerly travellers paid the 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 123 

guides five, six, ten francs for viewing it ; but now the 
Piedmontese had made a tariff, and the poor guides 
could only exact a franc from each person, Things 
were in a ruinous condition. 

By this we had arrived at a little inn on the top of 
the mountain, very near the ruins of the palaces. 
k4 Here," said the patriarch, " it is customary for 
strangers to drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius." 
We obediently entered the hostelry, and the land- 
lord — a white-toothed, brown-faced, good-humored 
peasant — gallantly ran forward and presented the 
ladies with bouquets of roses. We thought it a 
pretty and graceful act, but found later that it was 
to be paid for, like all pretty and graceful things in 
Italy ; for when we came to settle for the wine, and 
the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that 
he had presented the ladies with flowers, — yet he 
equally gave me his benediction when I refused to 
pay for his politeness. 

" Now here," again said the patriarch in a solemn 
whisper, " you can see the Tarantella danced for two 
francs ; whereas down at your inn, if you hire the 
dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five 
or six francs." The difference was tempting, and 
decided us in favor of an immediate Tarantella. 
The muletresses left their beasts to browse about the 
door of the inn and came- into the little public room, 
where were already the wife and sister of the land- 
lord, and took their places vis-d-vis, while the land- 
lord seized his tambourine and beat from it a wild 
and lively measure. The women were barefooted 



124 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

and hoopless, and they gave us the Tarantella with 
all the beauty of natural movement and free floating 
drapery, and with all that splendid grace of pose 
which animates the antique statues and pictures of 
dancers. They swayed themselves in time with the 
music ; then, filled with its passionate impulse, ad- 
vanced and retreated and whirled away ; — snapping 
their finders above their heads, and looking over their 
shoulders with a gay and a laughing challenge to 
each other, they drifted through the ever-repeated 
figures of flight and wooing, and wove for us pictures 
of delight that remained upon the brain like the ef- 
fect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return to 
illumine and complete any representation of that 
indescribable dance. Heaven knows what peril there 
might have been in the beauty and grace of the 
pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, 
who, I must confess, could only burlesque some of 
her niece's airiest movements, and whose hard-bought 
buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She 
earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she 
seemed glad when the dance was over, and went 
contentedly back to her mule. 

The patriarch had early retired from the scene as 
from a vanity with which he was too familiar for en- 
joyment, and I found him, when the Tarantella was 
done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock 
immediately behind the inn, over which the Capriotes 
say Tiberius used to cast the victims of his pleasures 
after he was sated with them. These have taken 
their place in the insular imagination as Christian 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 125 

martyrs, though it is probable that the poor souls 
were any tiling but Nazarenes. It took a stone 
thrown from the brink of the rock twenty seconds to 
send back a response from the water below, and the 
depth was too dizzying to look into. So we looked 
instead toward Amalfi, across the Gulf of Salerno, 
and toward Naples, across her bay. On every hand 
the sea was flushed with sunset, and an unspeakable 
calm dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it 
softened and softened in the distance, and withdrew 
themselves into dreams of ghostly solitude and phan- 
tom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius 
is well known to have been a man of sentiment, and 
he may often have sought this spot to enjoy the even- 
ing hour. It was convenient to his palace, and he 
could here give a fillip to his jaded sensibilities by 
popping a boon companion over the cliff, and thus 
enjoy the fine poetic contrast which his perturbed 
and horrible spirit afforded to that scene of innocence 
and peace. Later he may have come hither also, 
when lust failed, when all the lewd plays and devices 
of his fancy palled upon his senses, when sin had 
grown insipid and even murder ceased to amuse, and 
his majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in that 
terrible letter : " What to write to you, or how to 
write, I know not ; and what not to write at this 
time, may all the gods and goddesses torment me 
more than I daily feel that I suffer if I do know." 

The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his small 
way, and he presently turned to me with a counte- 
nance full of cowardly trouble and base remorse. 



126 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

" I pray you, little sir, not to tell the landlord below 
there that you have seen the Tarantella danced 
here ; for he has daughters and friends to dance it 
for strangers, and gets a deal of money by it. So, 
if he asks you to see it, do me the pleasure to say, 
lest he should take on Qpigliarsi) with me about it : 
6 Thanks, but we saw the Tarantella at Pompeii ! ' 
It was the last place in Italy where we were likely to 
have seen the Tarantella ; but these simple people 
are improvident in lying, as in every thing else. 

The patriarch had a curious spice of malice in 
him, which prompted him to speak evil of all, and to 
as many as he dared. After we had inspected the 
ruins of the emperor's villa„a clownish imbecile of a 
woman, professing to be the wife of the peasant who 
had made the excavations, came forth out of a cleft 
in the rock and received tribute of us — why, I do 
not know. The patriarch abetted the extortion, but 
Parthianly remarked, as we turned away, " Her 
husband ought to be here ; but this is zfesta, and 
he is drinking and gaming in the village," while the 
woman protested that he was sick at home. There 
was also a hermit living in great publicity among the 
ruins, and the patriarch did not spare him a sneering 
comment.* He had even a bad word for Tiberius, 
and reproached the emperor for throwing people over 
the cliff, though I think it a sport in which he would 

* This hermit I have heard was not brought up to the profusion 
of anchorite, but was formerly a shoemaker, and according to his 
own confession abandoned his trade because lie could better in- 
dulge a lethargic habit in the character of religious recluse. 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 127 

himself have liked to join. The only human creat- 
ures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were 
the brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke 
poetically as exiles and fugitives. 

As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come 
so far and so toilsomely to see, it must be confessed 
there was very little left of it. When that well- 
meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate de- 
molished his pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only 
those fragments of the beautiful brick masonry which 
yet remain, clinging indestructible to the rocks, and 
strewing the ground with rubbish. The recent ex- 
cavations have discovered nothing besides the unin- 
teresting foundations of the building, except a sub- 
terranean avenue leading from one part of the palace 
to another : this is walled with delicate brickwork, 
and exquisitely paved with white marble mosaic ; and 
this was all that witnessed of the splendor of the 
wicked emperor. Nature, the all-forgetting, all-for- 
giving, that takes the red battle-field into her arms 
and hides it with blossom and harvest, could not 
remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudi- 
nous murder of war. The sea, which the despot's 
lust and fear had made so lonely, slept with the white 
sails of boats secure upon its breast ; the little bays 
and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had for- 
gotten their desecration ; and the gathering twilight, 
the sweetness of the garden-bordered pathway, and 
the serenity of the lonely landscape, helped us to 
doubt history. 

We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had 



128 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

ascended, noting again the mansion of the surprising 
Englishman who had come to Capri for three months 
and had remained thirty years ; passed through the 
darkness of the village, — dropped here and there 
with the vivid red of a lamp, — and so reached the 
inn at last, where we found the landlord ready to 
have the Tarantella danced for us. We framed a 
discreeter fiction than that prepared for us by the pa- 
triarch, and went in to dinner, where there were two 
Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many rogues 
of boatmen, who, having contracted to take them 
back that night to Naples, were now trying to fly 
their bargain and remain at Capri till the morrow. 
The Danes beat them, however, and then sat down 
to dinner, and to long stories of the imposture and 
villany of the Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed 
himself that the day before, having unwisely eaten a 
dozen oysters without agreeing first with the oyster- 
man upon the price, he had been obliged to pay this 
scamp's extortionate demand to the full, since he was 
unable to restore him his property. We thought 
that something like this might have happened to an 
imprudent man in any country, but we did not the 
less join him in abusing the Italians — the purpose 
for which foreigners chiefly visit Italy. 



II. 

Standing on the height among the ruins of Ti- 
berius's palace, the patriarch had looked out over 
the waters, and predicted for the morrow the finest 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 129 

weather that had ever been known in that region ; 
but in spite of this prophecy the day dawned storm- 
ily, and at breakfast time we looked out doubtfully on 
waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance to the 
Blue Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is 
by a semicircular opening, some three feet in width 
and two feet in height, and just large enough to ad- 
mit a small boat. One lies flat in the bottom of this, 
waits for the impulse of a beneficent wave, and is 
carried through the mouth of the cavern, and res- 
cued from it in like manner by some receding billow. 
When the wind is in the wrong quarter, it is impos- 
sible to enter the grot at all ; and we waited till nine 
o'clock for the storm to abate before we ventured 
forth. In the mean time one of the Danish gentle- 
men, who — after assisting his companion to compel 
the boatmen to justice the night before — had stayed 
at Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, re- 
turned from it, and we besieged him with a hundred 
questions concerning it. But he preserved the wise 
silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged 
calf, and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all 
the boys who are doubtful whether the monster is 
worth their money. Our Dane would merely say 
that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto ; 
that he had seen it ; that he was glad he had seen it. 
As to its blueness, Messieurs — yes, it is blue. (Jest 

a dire 

The ladies had been amusing themselves with a 
perusal of the hotel register, and the notes of admi- 
ration or disgust with which the different sojourners 
u 



130 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English peo- 
ple found fault with the poor little hostelry and the 
French people praised it. Commander Joshing and 
Lieutenant Prattent, R. N., of the former nation, 
" were cheated by the donkey women, and thought 
themselves extremely fortunate to have escaped with 
their lives from the effects of Capri vintage. The 
landlord was an old Cossack." On the other hand, 
we read, " J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passe 
quinze jours ici, et n'a eu que des felicitds du patron 
de cet hotel et de sa famille." Cheerful man of let- 
ters ! His good-natured record will keep green a 
name little known to literature. Who are G. Brad- 
shaw, Duke of New York, and Signori Jones and 
Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the United States ? 
Their patrician names followed the titles of several 
English nobles in the register. But that which most 
interested the ladies in this Vecord was the warning 
of a terrified British matron against any visit to the 
Blue Grotto except in the very calmest weather. 
The British matron penned her caution after an all 
but fatal experience. ' The ladies read it aloud to us, 
and announced that for themselves they would be 
contented with pictures of the Blue Grotto and our 
account of its marvels. 

On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats 
of the guides to the Blue Grotto, and we descended 
to take one of them. The fixed rate is a franc for 
each person. The boatmen wanted five francs for 
each of us. We explained that although not indige- 
nous to Capri, or even Italy, we were not of the sue- 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 131 

culent growth of travellers, and would not be eaten. 
We retired to our vantage ground on the heights. 
The guides called us to the beach again. They 
would take us for three francs apiece, or say six 
francs for both of us. We withdrew furious to the 
heights again, where we found honest Antonino, who 
did us the pleasure to yell to his fellow-scoundrels on 
the beach, " You had better take these signori for a 
just price. They are going to the syndic to com- 
plain of you." At which there arose a lamentable 
outcry among the boatmen, and they called with one 
voice for us to come down and go for a franc apiece. 
This fable teaches that common-carriers are rogues 
everywhere ; but that whereas we are helpless in 
their hands at home, we may bully them into recti- 
tude in Italy, where they are afraid of the law. 

We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in 
the boat of the patriarch — for I need hardly say he 
was first and most rapacious of the plundering crew 

— when we found ourselves in very turbulent waters, 
in the face of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from 
the sea. Here and there, where their swarthy fronts 
were softened with a little verdure, goat- paths wound 
up and down among the rocks ; and midway between 
the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, 
we saw the Roman masonry of certain antique baths 

— baths of Augustus^ says Valery ; baths of Tiberius, 
say the Capriotes, zealous for the honor of their in- 
famous hero. Howbeit, this was all we saw on the 
way to the Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves 
rose higher, emulous of the bluffs, which would not 



132 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

have afforded a foothold, or any thing to cling to, had 
we been upset and washed against them — and we 
began to talk of the immortality of the soul. As we 
neared the grotto, the patriarch entertained us with 
stories of the perilous adventures of people who in- 
sisted upon entering it in stormy weather, — espe- 
cially of a French painter who had been imprisoned 
in it four days, and kept alive only on rum, which 
the patriarch supplied him, swimming into the grotto 
with a bottle-full at a time. " And behold us ar- 
rived, gentlemen ! " said he, as he brought the boat 
skillfully around in front of the small semicircular 
opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We lie flat on 
the bottom of the boat, and complete the immersion 
of that part of our clothing which the driving tor- 
rents of rain had spared. The wave of destiny rises 
with us upon its breast — sinks, and w r e are inside of 
the Blue Grotto. Not so much blue as gray, how- 
ever, and the water about the mouth of it green 
rather than azure. They say that on a sunny day 
both the water and the roof of the cavern are of the 
vividest cerulean tint — and I saw the grotto so rep- 
resented in the windows of the paint-shops at Na- 
ples. But to my own experience it did not differ 
from other caves in color or form : there was the 
customary clamminess in the air ; the sound of drop- 
ping water ; the sense of dull and stupid solitude, — 
a little relieved in this case by the mighty music of 
the waves breaking against the rocks outside. The 
grot is not great in extent, and the roof in the rear 
shelves gradually down to the water. Valery says 



CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 138 

that some remains of a gallery have caused the sup- 
position that the grotto was once the scene of Tibe- 
rius's pleasures ; and the Prussian painter who dis- 
covered the cave was led to seek it by something 
he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa used 
to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town 
of Anacapri on the mountain top. The slight frag- 
ment of ruin which we saw in one corner of the cave 
might be taken in confirmation of both theories ; 
but the patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, 
being probably tired at last of hearing Tiberius so 
much talked about. 

We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the ho- 
tel, where we found Antonino very doubtful about 
the possibility of getting back that day to Sorrento, 
and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of 
bad weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory 
consul. He was staying in Capri at our expense, 
and the honest fellow would willingly have spent a 
fortnight there. 

We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he 
came with all his household to present the account, 
— each one full of visible longing, yet restrained 
from asking buonamano by a strong sense of previous 
contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but 
they conquered themselves, and blessed us as we 
departed. The pretty muletress took leave of us 
on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies 
crouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking th'eii 
sea-sickness in silence. As we drew near the beau- 
tiful town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at the 



134 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

foot of the mountains, but high above the sea. An- 
tonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso, — in 
which the novelist Cooper also resided when in Sor- 
rento, — a white house not handsomer nor uglier 
than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the 
water. The bluffs are pierced by numerous arched 
caverns, as I have said, giving shelter to the fisher- 
men's boats, and here and there a devious stairway- 
mounts to their crests. Up one of these we walked, 
noting how in the house above us the people, with 
that puerility usually mixed with the Italian love of 
beauty, had placed painted busts of terra-cotta in the 
windows to simulate persons looking out. There was 
nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at 
the Hotel Rispoli ; and as for the grove of slender, 
graceful orange-trees in the midst of which the hotel 
stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every di- 
rection on the ground, why, I would willingly give 
for it all the currant-bushes, with their promises of 
jelly and jam, on which I gaze at this moment. 

Antonino attended us to our carriage when we 
went aw r ay. He had kept us all night at Capri, it is 
true, and he had brought us in at the end for a pro- 
digious huonamano ; yet I cannot escape the convic- 
tion that he parted from us with an unfulfilled pur- 
pose of greater plunder, and I have a compassion, 
which I here declare, for the strangers who fell next 
into his hands. He was good enough at the last 
moment to say that his name, Silver-Eye, w T as a 
nickname given him according to a custom of the 
Sorrentines ; and he made us a farewell bow that 
could not be bought in America for money. 



CAPRI AND CAPMOTES. 13£ 

At the station of Castellamare sat a curious cripple 
on the stones, — a man with little, short, withered 
legs, and a pleasant face. He showed us the ticket- 
office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After 
we had been in the waiting-room a brief time, he 
came swinging himself in upon his hands, followed by 
another person, who, when the cripple had planted 
himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped 
out a tape from his pocket and took his measure for 
a suit of clothes, the cripple twirling and twisting 
himself about in every way for the tailor's conven- 
ience. Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, 
and when his measure was thus publicly taken, the 
cripple gravely swung himself out as he had swung 
himself in. 



XL 

THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 

I had the pleasure one day of visiting nearly all 
the free schools which the wise philanthropy of the 
Protestant residents of Naples has established in that 
city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me, be- 
cause I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion enough, 
no doubt) the great changes which had taken place 
in Italy under its new national government, and was 
desirous to see for myself the. sort of progress the 
Italians of the south were making in avenues so long 
closed to them. I believe I have no mania for mis- 
sionaries ; I have heard of the converted Jew-and-a- 
half, and I have thought it a good joke; but I cannot 
help offering a very cordial homage to the truth that 
the missionaries are doing a vast deal of good in Na- 
ples, where they are not only spreading the gospel, but 
the spelling-book, the arithmetic, and the geography. 

It is not to be understood from the word mission- 
aries, that this work is done by men especially sent 
from England or America to perform it. The free 
Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the 
auspices of the Evangelical Aid Committee, — com- 
posed of members of the English Church, the Swiss 
Church, and the Presbyterian Church ; the Presi- 



PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 137 

dent of this committee is Dr. Strange, an English- 
man, and the Treasurer is Mr. Rogers, the American 
banker. The missionaries in Naples, therefore, are 
men who have themselves found out their work and 
appointed themselves to do it. The gentleman by 
whose kindness I was permitted to visit the schools 
was one of these men, — the Rev. Mr. Buscarlet, the 
pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss 
by birth, who had received his education chiefly in 
Scotland. 

He accompanied me to the different schools, and as 
we walked up the long Toledo, and threaded our 
way through the sprightly Neapolitan crowd, he told 
me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar 
difficulties encountered in their foundation and main- 
tenance. They are no older than the union of Na- 
ples with the Kingdom of Italy, when toleration of 
Protestantism was decreed by law ; and from the 
first, their managers proceeded upon a principle of 
perfect openness and candor with the parents who 
wished to send their children to them. They an- 
nounced that the children would be taught certain 
branches of learning, and that the whole Bible would 
be placed in their hands, to be studied and under- 
stood. In spite of this declaration of the Protestant 
character of the schools, the parents of the chil- 
dren were so anxious to secure them the benefits of 
education, that they willingly ran the risk of their 
becoming heretics. They were principally people of 
the lower classes, — laborers, hackmen, fishermen, 
domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but occasion- 



138 ITALTAN JOURNEYS. 

ally among them were parents able to send their 
children to other schools, yet preferring the thorough 
and conscientious system practiced in these. So the 
children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncom- 
bative nature of Italian boys, who get on with much 
less waylaying and thumping and bullying than boys 
of northern blood, they have not been molested by 
their companions who still live the wild life of the 
streets, and they have only once suffered through in- 
terference of the priests. On complaint to the au- 
thorities the w r rong was promptly redressed, and was 
not again inflicted. Of course these poor little peo- 
ple, picked up out of the vileness and ignorance of a 
city that had suffered for ages the most degrading op- 
pression, are by no means regenerate yet, but there 
seems to be great hope for them. Now at least they 
are taught a reasonable and logical morality — and 
who can tell what wonders the novel instruction may 
not work ? They learn for the first time that it is a 
foolish shame to lie and cheat, and it would scarcely 
be surprising if some of them were finally persuaded 
that Honesty is the best Policy — a maxim that few 
Italians believe. And here lies the trouble, — in the 
unfathomable, disheartening duplicity of the race. 
The children are not quarrelsome, nor cruel, nor 
brutal ; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by 
long generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost 
ineradicable. The fault is worse in Naples than else- 
where in Italy ; but # how bad it is everywhere, not 
merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must bear 
witness. 



PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 139 

The first school which we visited was a girls' 
school, in which some forty-four little women of all 
ages, from four to fifteen years, were assembled un- 
der the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian 
Protestant, who had delegated her authority to dif- 
ferent children under her. The small maidens 
gathered around their chiefs in groups, and read 
from the book in which they were studying when we 
appeared. Some allowance must be made for differ- 
ence of the languages, Italian being logically spelled 
and easily pronounced ; but I certainly never heard 
American children of their age read nearly so well. 
They seemed also to have a lively understanding of 
what they read, and to be greatly interested in the 
scriptural stories of which their books w T ere made up. 
They repeated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of 
poetry, all very eagerly and prettily. As bashfulness 
is scarcely known to their race, they had no hesita- 
tion in showing off their accomplishments before a 
stranger, and seemed quite delighted with his ap- 
plause. They were not particularly quiet ; perhaps 
with young Neapolitans that would be impossible. 
I saw their copy-books, in which the writing was 
very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine 
to be as legible,) and the books were kept neat and 
clean, as were the hands and faces of the children. 
Taking the children as one goes in the streets of Na- 
ples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many 
clean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanli- 
ness is resolutely insisted upon. Many of the chil- 
dren were ragged ; here and there was one hideous 



140 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

with ophthalmia; but there was not a clouded coun- 
tenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We should 
have great hopes for a nation of which the children 
can be taught to wash themselves. 

There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior 
school, where geography, mathematics, linear draw- 
ing, French, Italian history, and ancient history were 
taught. A brief examination showed the boys to be 
well up in their studies; — indeed they furnished 
some recondite information about Baffin's Bay for 
which I should not myself have liked to be called on 
suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of 
neatness, and betrayed that aptness for form and 
facility of execution which are natural to the Ital- 
ians. Some of these boys had been in the schools 
nearly three years ; they were nearly all of the 
class which must otherwise have grown up to hope- 
less vagabondage ; but here they were receiving 
gratis an education that would fit them for em- 
ployments w r herein trained intellectual capacity is 
required. If their education went no higher than 
this, what an advance it would be upon their origi- 
nal condition ! : 

In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I en- 
tangled myself in difficulties with a bright-eyed 
young gentleman, whom I asked if he liked Italian 
history better than ancient history. He said he 
liked the latter, especially that of the Romans, much 
better. " Why, that is strange. I should think an 
Italian boy would like Italian history best." " But 
were not the Romans also Italians, Signore ? " I 



PKOTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 141 

blush to say that I basely sneaked out of this trouble 
by answering that they were not like the Italians of 
the present day, — w r hatever that meant. But in- 
deed all these young persons were startlingly quick 
with their information, and knowing that I knew 
very little on any subject with certainty, I think I 
w r as wise to refuse all offers to examine them in their 
studies. 

We left this school and returned to the Toledo by 
one of those wonderful little side streets already men- 
tioned, which are forever tumultuous with the oddest 
Neapolitan life — with men quarreling themselves 
purple over small quantities of fish — with asses 
braying loud and clear above their discord — with 
women roasting pine-cones at charcoal fires — w r ith 
children in the agonies of having their hair combed 

— with degraded poultry and homeless dogs — with 
fruit-stands and green groceries, and the little edifices 
of ecclesiastical architecture for the sale of lemonade 

— with wandering bag-pipers, and herds of noncha- 
lant goats — with horses, and grooms currying them 

— and over all, from vast heights of balcony, with 
people lazily hanging upon rails and looking down 
on the riot. Reentering the stream of the Toledo, 
it carried us almost to the Museo Borbonico before 
we again struck aside into one of the smaller streets, 
whence we climbed quite to the top of one of those 
incredibly high Neapolitan houses. Here, crossing 
an open terrace on the roof, w r e visited three small 
rooms, in which there were altogether some hundred 
boys in the first stages of reclamation. They were 



142 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

under the immediate superintendence of Mr. Buscar* 
let, and he seemed to feel the fondest interest in 
them. Indeed, there was sufficient reason for this : 
up to a certain point, the Neapolitan children learn 
so rapidly and willingly that it can hardly be other 
than a pleasure to teach them. After this, their 
zeal flags ; they know enough ; and their parents and 
friends, far more ignorant than they, are perfectly 
satisfied with their progress. Then the difficulties 
of their teachers begin ; but here, in these lowest 
grade schools, they had not yet begun. The boys 
were still eager to learn, and were ardently following 
the lead of their teachers. They were little fellows, 
nearly all, and none of them had been in school 
more than a year and a half, while some had been 
there only three or four months. They rose up 
with " Buon giorno, signori" as we entered, and 
could hardly be persuaded to lapse back to the duties 
of life during our stay. They had very good faces, 
indeed, for the most part, and even the vicious had 
intellectual brightness. Just and consistent usage 
has the best influence on them ; and one boy was 
pointed out as quite docile and manageable, whose 
parents had given him up as incorrigible before lie 
entered the school. As it was, there was something 
almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being pos- 
sible to him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The 
boys of these schools seldom play truant, and they 
are never severely beaten in school ; when quite in- 
tractable, notice is given to their parents, and they 
usually return in a more docile state. It sometimes 



PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 143 

happens that the boys are taken away by their 
parents, from one motive or another ; but they find 
their way back again, and are received as if nothing 
had happened. 

The teacher in the first room here is a handsome 
young Calabrian, with the gentlest face and manner, 
— one of the most efficient teachers under Mr. 
Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we 
entered, and one after another read passages to us. 
There were children of seven, eight, and nine years, 
who had been in the school only three months, and 
who read any part of their Bibles with facility and 
correctness ; of course, before coming to school they 
had not known one letter from another. The most 
accomplished scholar was a youngster, named Sag- 
giomo, who had received eighteen months' schooling. 
He was consequently very quick indeed, and wanted 
to answer all the hard questions put to the other 
boys. In fact, all of them were ready enough, and 
there was a great deal of writhing and snapping 
of fingers among those who longed to answer some 
hesitator's question — just as you see in schools at 
home. They were examined in geography, and 
then in Bible history — particularly Joseph's story. 
They responded in chorus to all demands on this 
part of study, and could hardly be quieted sufficiently 
to give Sao-giomo's little brother, aged five, a chance 
to tell why Joseph's brethren sold him. As soon as 
he could be heard he piped out: " Per die Giuseppe 
aveva clei sogni!" (Because Joseph had dreams.) 
It was not exactly the right answer, hut nobody 



144 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

laughed at the little fellow, though they all roared 
out in correction when permitted. 

In the next room, boys somewhat older were ex- 
amined in Italian history, and responded correctly 
and promptly. They were given a sum which they 
performed in a miraculously short time ; and their 
copy-books, when shown, were equally creditable to 
them. Their teacher was a Bolognese, — a natural- 
ized Swiss, — who had been a soldier, and who 
maintained strict discipline among his irregulars, 
without, however, any perceptible terrorism. 

The amount of work these teachers accomplish in 
a day is incredible : the boys' school opens at eight 
in the morning and closes at four, with intermission 
of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same 
men teach a school for adults, and on Sunday have 
their classes in the Sunday-schools. And this the 
whole year round. Their pay is not great, being 
about twenty dollars a month, and they are evidently 
not wholly self-interested from this fact. The 
amount of good they accomplish under the direction 
of their superiors is in proportion to the work done. 
To appreciate it, the reader must consider that they 
take the children of the most ignorant and degraded 
of all the Italians ; that they cause them to be 
washed corporeally, first of all, and then set about 
cleansing them morally ; and having cleared away as 
much of the inherited corruption of ages as possible, 
they begin to educate them in the various branches 
of learning. There is no direct proselyting in the 
schools, but the Bible is the first studv, and the chil- 



PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 145 

dren are constantly examined in it ; and the result is 
at Jeast not superstition. The advance upon the old 
condition of things is incalculably great ; for till the 
revolution under Garibaldi in 1860, the schools of 
Naples were all in the hands of the priests or their 
creatures, and the little learning there imparted was 
as dangerous as it could well be made. Now these 
schools are free, the children are honestly and thor- 
oughly taught, and if they are not directly instructed 
in Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate 
religion with morality, probably for the first time in 
their lives. Too much credit cannot be given to the 
Italian government which has acted in such good 
faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting 
them from all interruption and persecution ; but af- 
ter all, the great praise is due to their own wise, 
unflagging zeal. They have worked unostenta- 
tiously, making no idle attacks on time-honored prej- 
udices, but still having a purpose of enlightenment 
which they frankly avowed. The people whom 
they seek to benefit judge them by their works, and 
the result is that they have quite as much before 
them as they can do. Their discouragements are 
great. The day's teaching is often undone at home; 
the boys forget as aptly as they learn ; and from the 
fact that only the baser feelings of fear and interest 
have ever been appealed to before in the Neapolitans, 
they have often to build in treacherous places with- 
out foundation of good faith or gratitude. Embar- 
rassments for want of adequate funds are sometimes 
10 



146 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

felt also. But no one can stud}'' their operations 
without feeling that success must attend their efforts, 
with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits tc 
the generation which shall one day help to govern 
free Italy. 



XII. 

BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. 

One day it became plain even to our reluctance 
that we could not stay in Naples forever, and the 
next morning we took the train for Rome. The 
Villa Reale put on its most alluring charm to him 
that ran down before breakfast to thrid once more 
its pathways bordered with palms and fountains and 
statues ; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in 
the light that made silver of the fishermen's sails ; 
far away rose Vesuvius with his nightcap of mist still 
hanging about his shoulders ; all around rang and rat- 
tled Naples. The city was never so fair before, nor 
could ever have been so hard to leave ; and at the 
last moment the landlord of the Hotel Washington 
must needs add a supreme pang by developing into a 
poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy he 
had written. The reader who has received at part- 
ing from the gentlemanly proprietor of one of our 
palatial hotels his " Ode on the Steam Elevator," 
will conceive of the shame and regret with which I 
thought of having upbraided our landlord about our 
rooms, of having stickled at small preliminaries con- 
cerning our contract for board, and for having alto- 
gether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me 



148 * ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

do him the tardy justice to say that lie keeps, after 
the Stella d'Oro at Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, 
and that his comedy was really very sprightly. It is 
no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we 
know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double 
acclaim. 

Nobody who cares to travel -with decency and 
comfort can take the second-class cars on the road 
between Naples and Rome, though these are per- 
fectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal 
city makes her influence felt for sbabbiness and un- 
cleanliness wherever she can, and her management 
seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into the 
second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class, — 
which in themselves were bad, — and we took our 
places almost contentedly. 

The road passed through the wildest country we 
had seen in Italy ; and presently a rain began to fall 
and made it drearier than ever. The land was much 
grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and 
there sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs 
were feeding upon the acorns, and the wet swine- 
herds w r ere steaming over fires built at their roots. 
In some places the forest was quite dense ; in other 
places it fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill- 
sides bare, and solitary but for the sheep that nibbled 
at the scanty grass, and the shepherds that leaned 
upon their crooks #nd motionlessly stared at us as we 
rushed by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery 
grew lonelier yet ; the land rose into desolate, ster- 
ile, stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their 



BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. 149 

nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the 
gloomy expanse of the Campagna. 

The towns along the route had little to interest us 
in their looks, though at San Germano we caught a 
glimpse of the famous old convent of Monte-Cassino, 
perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of the 
rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to 
climb that steep acclivity, and wander through the 
many-volumed library of the ancient Benedictine re- 
treat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and cer- 
tainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaint- 
ance with the monastery would have been. Two 
Croatian priests, who shared our compartment of the 
railway carriage, first drew our notice to the place, 
and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it 
was out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men 
they were, and how hard it seemed that they should 
be priests and Croats ! They told us all about the 
city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us such a 
glowing account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that 
we began to doubt at last if the seat of literature 
were not somewhere on the east coast of the Adri- 
atic ; and I hope we left them the impression that 
the literary centre of the world was not a thousand 
miles from the horse-car office in Harvard Square. 

Here and there repairs were going forward on the 
railroad, and most of the laborers were women. 
They were straight and handsome girls, and moved 
with a stately grace under the baskets of earth bal- 
anced on their heads. Brave black eyes they had, 
such as love to look and to be looked at ; they were 
not in the least hurried by their work, but desisted 



150 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

from it to gaze at the passengers whenever the train 
stopped. They all wore their beautiful peasant cos- 
tume, — the square white linen head-dress falling to 
the shoulders, the crimson bodice, and the red scant 
skirt ; and how they contrived to keep themselves so 
"fclean at their work, and to look so spectacular in it 
all, remains one of the many Italian mysteries. 

Another of these mysteries we beheld in the little 
beggar-boy at Isoletta. He stood at the corner of 
the station quite mute and motionless during our 
pause, and made no sign of supplication or entreaty. 
He let his looks beg "for him. He was perfectly 
beautiful and exceedingly picturesque. Where his 
body was not quite naked, his jacket and trousers 
hung in shreds and points ; his long hair grew 
through the top of his hat, and fell over like a plume. 
Nobody could resist him ; people ran out of the cars, 
at the risk of being left behind, to put coppers into 
the little dirty hand held languidly out to receive 
them. The boy thanked none, smiled on none, but 
looked curiously and cautiously at all, with the quick 
perception and the illogical conclusions of his class 
and race. As we started he did not move, but re- 
mained in his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we 
glanced back, the mystery of him seemed to be 
solved for a moment : he would stand there till he 
grew up into a graceful, prayerful, pitiless brigand, 
and then he would rend from travel the tribute now 
so freely given him. But after all, though his future 
seemed clear, and he appeared the type of a strange 
and hardly reclaimable people, he was not quite a 
solution of the Neapolitan puzzle. 



XIII. 

ROMAN PEARLS. 
I. 

The first view of the ruins in the Forum brought 
a keen sense of disappointment. I knew that they 
could only be mere fragments and rubbish, but I was 
not prepared to find them so. I learned that I had 
all along secretly hoped for some dignity of neighbor- 
hood, some affectionate solicitude on the part of Na- 
ture to redeem these works of Art from the destruction 
that had befallen them. But in hollows below the 
level of the dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil- 
eyed buffaloes, and obscenely defiled by w T ild beasts 
of men, there stood here an arch, there a pillar, yon- 
der a cluster of columns crowned by a bit of frieze ; 
and yonder again, a fragment of temple, half-gorged 
by the facade of a hideous Renaissance church ; then 
a height of vaulted brick-work, and, leading on to the 
Coliseum, another arch, and then incoherent columns 
overthrown and mixed with dilapidated walls — mere 
phonographic consonants, dumbly representing the 
past, out of which all vocal glory had departed. The 
Coliseum itself does not much better express a cer- 
tain phase of Roman life than does the Arena at 
Verona ; it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it 



152 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

seemed not grander otherwise, while it is vastly 
more ruinous. Even the Pantheon failed to impress 
me at first sight, though I found myself disposed to 
return to it again and again, and to be more and more 
affected by it. 

Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. 
It is the least interesting tow r n in Italy, and the archi- 
tecture is hopelessly ugly— especially the architect- 
ure of the churches. The Papal city contrives at 
the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your 
thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from 
your eye, and old Rome only occurs to you in a sort 
of stupid wonder over the depth at which it is buried. 
I confess that I was glad to get altogether away 
from it after a first look at the ruins in the Forum, 
and to take refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendi- 
canti, where we w T ere charged to see the little Vir- 
ginia G. The Conservatorio, though a charitable in- 
stitution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants as its 
name would imply, but none of the many young girls 
there were the children of rich men. They were 
often enough of parentage actually hungry and rag- 
ged, but they were often also the daughters of honest 
poor folk, who paid a certain sum toward their 
maintenance and education in the Conservatorio. 
Such was the case with little Virginia, whose father 
was at Florence, doubly impeded from seeing her by 
the fact that Jie had fought against the Pope for the 
Republic of 1848, and by the other fact that he had 
since wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by turn- 
ing Protestant. 



ROMAN PEARLS. 153 

Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to jingle 
some time after we were admitted, w r e found our- 
selves in a sort of reception-room, of the general 
quality of a cellar, and in the presence of a portress 
who was perceptibly preserved from mold only by 
the great pot of coals that stood in the centre of 
the place. Some young girls, rather pretty than 
not, attended the ancient woman, and kindly acted 
as the ear-trumpet through which our wishes were 
conveyed to her mind. The Conservatorio was not, 
so far, as conventual as we had imagined it ; but as 
the gentleman of the party was strongly guarded 
by female friends, and asked at once to see the Su- 
perior, he concluded that there was, perhaps, some- 
thing so unusually reassuring to the recluses in his 
appearance and manner that they had not thought it 
necessary to behave very rigidly. It later occurred to 
this gentleman that the promptness with which the 
pretty mendicants procured him an interview with the 
Superior had a flavor of self-interest in it, and that 
he who came to the Conservatorio in the place of a fa- 
ther might have been for a moment ignorantly viewed 
as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From what- 
ever danger there was in this error the Superior soon 
appeared to rescue him, and we were invited into a 
more ceremonious apartment on the first floor, and 
the little Virginia was sent for. The visit of the 
strangers caused a tumult and interest in the quiet 
old Conservatorio of which it is hard to conceive 
now, and the excitement grew tremendous when it 
appeared that the signori were Americani and Prot- 



154 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

estanti. We imparted a savor of novelty and im- 
portance to Virginia herself, and when she appeared, 
the Superior and her assistant looked at her with no 
small curiosity and awe, of which the little maiden 
instantly became conscious, and began to take ad- 
vantage. Accompanying us over the building and 
through the grounds, she cut her small friends 
wherever she met them, and was not more than 
respectful to the assistant. 

It was from an instinct of hospitality that we were 
shown the Conservatorio, and instructed in regard to 
all its purposes. We saw the neat dormitories w T ith 
their battalions of little white beds ; the kitchen with 
its gigantic coppers for boiling broth, and the refec- 
tory with the smell of the frugal dinners of genera- 
tions of mendicants in it. The assistant was very 
proud of the neatness of every thing, and was glad 
to talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It ap- 
peared that the girls were taught reading, writing, 
and plain sewing when they were young, and that 
the Conservatorio was chiefly sustained by pious 
contributions and bequests. Any lingering notion 
of the conventual character of the place was dispelled 
by the assistant's hurrying to say, "And when we 
can get the poor things well married, we are glad 
to do so." 

" But how does any one ever see them ? " 
" Eh ! well, that is easily managed. Once a 
month we dress the marriageable girls in their best, 
and take them for a walk in the street. If an hon- 
est young man falls in love with one of them going 



ROMAN PEARLS. 155 

by, lie comes to the Superior, and describes her as 
well as he can, and demands to see her. She is 
called, and if both are pleased, the marriage is ar- 
ranged. You see it is a very simple affair." 

And there was, to the assistant's mind, nothing odd 
in the whole business, insomuch that I felt almost 
ashamed of marveling at it. 

Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we as- 
cended by stairs and gateways into garden spaces, 
chiefly planted with turnips and the like poor but 
respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with 
fragments of antique statuary, and here and there a 
fountain in a corner, trickling from moss-grown rocks, 
and falling into a trough of travertine, about the feet 
of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had forgot- 
ten what her name was. 

Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing 
had been within her recollection, though it must 
have been centuries before, the antiquities of the 
Conservatorio were much more numerous and strik- 
ing ; but they were now removed to the different 
museums. Nevertheless they had still a beautiful 
prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if we 
would follow her ; and presently, to our surprise, we 
stepped from the garden upon the roof of the Temple 
of Peace. The assistant had not boasted without 
reason : away before us stretched the Campagna, a 
level w r aste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms 
that here and there waved like black plumes upon 
it, and for the arched lengths of the acqueducts that 
seemed to stalk down from the ages across the 



156 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now 
and then a ruinous gap in the line, as if one had 
fallen out weary by the way. The city all around 
us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, 
and far below us, — on the length of the Forum over 
which the Appian Way stretched from the Capito- 
line Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus and 
the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leav- 
ing the Coliseum on the left, and losing itself in 
the foliage of the suburbs, — the Past seemed strug- 
gling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape 
and animate itself anew. The effort was more suc- 
cessful than that which we had helped the Past to 
make when standing on the level of the Forum ; 
but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of 
the incongruity of the red-legged Zouaves wander- 
ing over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists 
trying to make her out with their Murrays. 

In a day or two after this we returned again to 
our Conservatorio, where we found that the excite- 
ment created by our first visit had been kept fully 
alive by the events attending the photographing of 
Virginia for her fathe.r. Not only Virginia was 
there to receive us, but her grandmother also — an 
old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of 
age, who could only weep and smile in token of her 
content. I think she had but a dim idea, after all, 
of what went on beyond the visible fact of Virginia's 
photograph, and that she did not quite understand 
how we could cause it to be taken for her son. 
She was deeply compassionated by the Superior, who 



ROMAN PEARLS. 157 

rendered her pity with a great deal of gesticulation, 
casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders, and 
sighing grievously. But the assistant's cheerfulness 
could not be abated even by the spectacle of extreme 
age; and she made the most of the whole occasion, 
recounting with great minuteness all the incidents of 
the visit to the photographer's, and running to get 
the dress Virginia sat in, that we might see how ex- 
actly it was given in the picture. Then she gave us 
much discourse concerning the Conservatorio and its 
usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life 
there was altogether eventless. " Here we have a 
little amusement also/' she said. " The girls have 
their relatives to visit them sometimes, and then in 
the evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves ! 
I am half old (mezzo-vecchicC). I am done with 
these things. But for youth, always kept down, 
something lively is wanted." 

When we took leave of these simple folks, we 
took leave of almost the only natural and unprepared 
aspect of Italian life which we were to see in Rome ; 
but we did not know this at the time. 



II. 

Indeed, it seems to me that all moisture of ro- 
mance and adventure has been wellnigh sucked out 
of travel in Italy, and that compared with the old 
time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura 
through the innumerable little states of the Penin- 
sula, — halted every other mile to show his passport, 



158 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

and robbed by customs officers in every color of 
shabby uniform and* every variety of cocked hat, — 
the present railroad period is one of but stale and 
insipid flavor. Much of local life and color re- 
mains, of course ; but the hurried traveller sees little 
of it, and, passed from one grand hotel to another, 
without material change in the cooking or the meth- 
ods of extortion, he might nearly as well remain at 
Paris. The Italians, who live to so great extent by 
the travel through their country, learn our abomina- 
ble languages and minister to our detestable comfort 
and propriety, till we have slight chance to know 
them as we once could, — ^musical, picturesque, and 
full of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, 
and all uncleanness. Rome really belongs s to the 
Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the past 
seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. 
Every thing is systematized as thoroughly as in a 
museum where the objects are all ticketed ; and our 
prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving. 
Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza di 
Spagna, and now the beggars are labeled like police- 
men, with an immense plate bearing the image of St. 
Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy 
person when you bestow charity on one of them, and 
not, alas ! to some abandoned impostor, as in former 
days. One of these highly recommended mendicants 
gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us 
in English ! No custodian will answer you, if he 
can help it, in the Italian which he speaks so ex- 
quisitely, preferring to speak bad French instead ; 



ROMAN PEARLS. 153 

and in all the shops on the Corso the English tongue 
is de rigueur. 

After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think 
we found one of the most simple and interesting of 
Romans in the monk who showed us the Catacombs 
of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, 
were not restored like those of St. Calixtus, but 
were just as the martyrs left them ; and, as I do not 
remember to have read anywhere that they are 
formed merely of long, low, narrow, wandering un- 
der-ground passages, lined on either side with tombs 
in tiers like berths on a steamer, and expanding here 
and there into small square chambers, bearing the 
traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as chap- 
els, — I venture to offer the information here. The 
reader is to keep in his mind a darkness broken by 
the light of wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness 
and narrowness, or he cannot realize the catacombs 
as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before en- 
tering the passage leading from the floor of the church 
to the tombs, in which there was still some " fine 
small dust " of the martyrs, warned us that to touch 
it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, and 
then gently craved pardon for having mentioned the 
fact. But, indeed, it was only to persons who showed 
a certain degree of reverence that these places were 
now exhibited ; for some Protestants who had been 
permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious 
ashes, merely to throw away. I assured him that I 
thought them beasts to do it ; and I was afterwards 
puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness 



160 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

in the remnants of mortality, hardly to he distin- 
guished from the common earth out of which the 
catacombs were duo;. 



in. 

Returning to the church above we found, kneel* 
ing before one of the altars, two pilgrims, — a man 
and a woman. The latter was habited in a nun- 
like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's 
coat of coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in 
his hand, and showed under his close hood a fine, 
handsome, reverent face, full of a sort of tender awe, 
touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance 
upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, 
with rogue so plainly written in his devotional coun- 
tenance that I was not surprised to be told that he 
was a species of spiritual valet de place, whose occu- 
pation it was to attend pilgrims on their tour to the 
Seven Churches at which these devotees pray in 
Rome, and there to direct their orisons and join in 
them. 

It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that 
the monk now uncovered the precious marble slab on 
which Christ stood when he met Peter flying from 
Rome and turned him back. You are shown the 
prints of the divine feet, which the conscious stone 
received and keeps forever ; and near at hand is one 
of the arrows w r ith w r hich St. Sebastian was shot. 
We looked at these things critically, having to pay 
for the spectacle ; but the pilgrims and their gui le 
were all faith and wonder. 



ROMAN PEARLS. 161 

I remember seeing nothing else so finely super- 
stitious at Rome. In a chapel near the Church of 
St. John Lateran are, as is well known, the marble 
steps which once belonged to Pilate's house, and 
which the Saviour is said to have ascended when he 
went to trial before Pilate. The steps are protected 
against the wear and tear of devotion by a stout 
casing of wood, and they are constantly covered with 
penitents, who ascend and descend them upon their 
knees. Most of the pious people whom I saw in this 
act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a 
good deal of giggling, as a very amusing feat. Some 
old and haggard women gave the scene all the dignity 
which it possessed ; but certain well-dressed ladies 
and gentlemen were undeniably awkward and ab- 
surd, and I was led to doubt if there were not an 
incompatibility between the abandon of simple faith 
and the respectability of good clothes. 



IV. 

In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk 
among travellers of the malaria at Rome, and having 
seen a case of Roman fever, I know it is a thing 
not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the mala- 
ria is laughed at by the foreign residents, — who, 
nevertheless, go out of the city in midsummer. The 
Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand or so, 
remain there the whole year round, and I am bound 
to say I never saw a healthier, robuster-looking popu- 
lation. The cheeks of the French soldiers, too, whom 
11 



162 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

we met at every turn, were red as their trousers, and 
they seemed to flourish on the imputed unwholesome- 
ness of the atmosphere. All at Rome are united in 
declaring that the fever exists at Naples, and that 
sometimes those who have taken it there come and 
die in Rome, in order to give the city a bad name ; 
and I think this very likely. 

Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there 
is a fountain in every square, and you are never 
out of the sound of falling water. The Corso 
and some of the principal streets do not so much im- 
press you with their filth as with their dullness ; 
but that part of the city where some of the most 
memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is un- 
imaginably vile. The least said of the state of 
the archways of the Coliseum the soonest mended ; 
and I have already spoken of the Forum. The 
streets near the Theatre of Pompey are almost im- 
passable, and the so-called House of Rienzi is a stable, 
fortified against approach by a fosse of excrement. 
A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most ap- 
propriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, 
and I am not sure that the moderns are mistaken in 
this. In the rascal streets in the neighborhood of 
the most august ruins, the people turn round to start 
at the stranger as he passes thern ; they are all dirty, 
and his decency must be no less a surprise to them 
than the neatness of the French soldiers amid all the 
filth is a puzzle to him. We wandered about a long 
time in such places one day, looking for the Tarpeian 
Rock, less for Tarpeia's sake than for the sake of 



ROMAN PEARLS. 163 

Miriam and Donatello and the Model. There are 
two Tarpeian rocks, between which the stranger 
takes his choice ; and we must have chosen the 
wrong one, for it seemed but a shallow gulf com- 
pared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat dis- 
appointed ; but then Niagara disappoints one ; and as 
for Mont Blanc .* . 



It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome 
to visit the Church of St. Peter's ; but it is scarcely 
worth while for rne to describe it, or for every one 
to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the 
cupola. In fact, this is a great labor, and there is 
nothing to be seen from the crevices in the ball 
which cannot be far more comfortably seen from the 
roof of the church below. 

The companions of our ascent to the latter point 
were an English lady and gentleman, brother and 
sister, and both Catholics, as they at once told us. 
The lady and myself spoke for some time in the 
Tuscan tongue before we discovered that neither of 
us was Italian, after which we paid each other some 
handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection 
of accent. The gentleman was a pleasant purple 
porpoise from the waters of Chili, whither he had 
wandered from the English coasts in early youth. 
He had two leading ideas : one concerned the Pope, 
to whom he had just been presented, and whom he 
viewed as the best and blandest of beings; the other 



164 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

related to his boy, then in England, whom he called 
Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and great- 
est of boys. With the view from the roof of the 
church this gentleman did not much trouble himself. 
He believed Jack Spratt could ride up to the roof 
where we stood on his donkey. As to the great 
bronze globe which we were hurrying to enter, he 
seemed to regard it merely as a rival in rotundity, 
and made not the slightest motion to follow us. 

I should be loth to vex the reader with any de- 
scription of the scene before us and beneath us, even 
if I could faithfully portray it. But I recollect, with 
a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness 
of the great fountain playing in the square before the 
church, and the harmony in which the city grew in 
every direction from it, like an emanation from its 
music, till the last house sank away into the pathetic 
solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but 
the snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest 
distance. At the same moment I experienced a rap- 
ture in reflecting that I had underpaid three hack- 
men during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed 
to avenge my race for ages of oppression. 

The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best felt in 
looking down upon the interior from the gallery that 
surrounds the inside of the dome, and in comparing 
one's own littleness with the greatness of all the 
neighboring mosaics. But as to the beauty of the 
temple, I could not find it without or within. 



ROMAN PEARLS. 165 



VI. 



In Rome one's fellow - tourists are a constant 
source of gratification and surprise. I thought that 
American travellers were by no means the most ab- 
surd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in 
their approval of the Eternal City. A certain order 
of German greenness affords, perhaps, the pleasant- 
est pasturage for the ruminating mind. For example, 
at the Villa Ludovisi there was, beside numerous 
Englishry in detached bodies, a troop of Germans, 
chiefly young men, frugally pursuing the Sehens- 
wiirdigkeiten in the social manner of their nation. 
They took their enjoyment very noisily, and wran- 
gled together with furious amiability as they looked 
at Guercino's " Aurora." Then two of them parted 
from the rest, and went to a little summer-house in 
the gardens, while the others followed us to the top 
of the Casino. There they caught sight of their 
friends in the arbor, and the spectacle appeared to 
overwhelm them. They bowed, they took off their 
hats, they waved their handkerchiefs. It was not 
enough : one young fellow mounted on the balus- 
trade of the roof at his neck's risk, lifted his hat on 
his cane and flourished it in greeting to the heart's- 
friends in the arbor, from whom he had parted two 
minutes before. 

In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusi- 
asm, so pumped and so unmistakably mixed with beer, 
a fat and pallid Englishwoman sat in a chair upon 
the roof and coldly, coldly sketched the lovely land- 



166 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

scape. And she and the blonde young English girl 
beside her pronounced a little dialogue together, which 
I give, because I saw that they meant it for the public: 

The Young Girl. — I wonder, you knoa, you don't 
draw-ow St. Petuh's ! 

T/ie Artist. — O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. 
Petuh's from so mennee powints. 

I am afraid that the worst form of American green- 
ness appears abroad in a desire to be perfectly up in 
critical appreciation of the arts, and to approach the 
great works in the spirit of the connoisseur. The 
ambition is not altogether a bad one. Still I could 
not help laughing at a fellow-countryman when he 
told me that he had not yet seen Raphael's " Trans- 
figuration," because he wished to prepare his mind 
for understanding the original by first looking at all 
the copies he could find. 



VII. 

The Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses 
every thing in splendor of marble and costly stone — 
porphyry, malachite, alabaster — and luxury of gild- 
ing that is to be seen at Rome. But I chiefly remem- 
ber it because on the road that leads to it, through 
scenes as quiet and peaceful as if history had never 
known them, lies the Protestant graveyard in which 
Keats is buried. Quite by chance the driver men- 
tioned it, pointing in the direction of the cemetery 
with his whip. We eagerly dismounted and repaired 
to the gate, where we were met by the son of the 
sexton., who spoke English through the beauteous line 



ROMAN PEARLS. 167 

of a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps a Christian could 
not be found in Rome to take charge of these here- 
tic graves, though Christians can be got to do almost 
any thing there for money. However, I do not think 
a Catholic would have kept the place in better order, 
or more intelligently understood our reverent curi- 
osity. It was the new burial-ground which we had 
entered, and which is a little to the right of the elder 
cemetery. It was very beautiful and tasteful in every 
way ; the names upon the stones were chiefly Eng- 
lish and Scotch, with here and there an American's. 
But affection drew us only to the prostrate tablet in- 
scribed with the words, " Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor 
Cordium," and then we were ready to go to the 
grave of him for whom we all feel so deep a tender- 
ness. The grave of John Keats is one of few in the 
old burying-ground, and lies almost in the shadow of 
the pyramid of Caius Cestius ; and I could not help 
thinking of the wonder the Roman would have felt 
could he have known into what unnamable richness 
and beauty his Greek faith had ripened in the heart 
of the poor poet, where it was mixed with so much 
sorrow. Doubtless, in his time, a prominent citizen 
like Caius Cestius was a leading member of the 
temple in his neighborhood, and regularly attended 
sacrifice : it would have been but decent ; and yet I 
fancied that a man immersed like him in affairs might 
have learned with surprise the inner and more fra- 
grant meaning of the symbols with the outside of 
which his life was satisfied ; and I was glad to reflect 
that in our day such a thing is impossible. 



168 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

The grave of our beloved poet is sunken to the 
level of the common earth, and is only marked by 
the quaintly lettered, simple stone bearing the famous 
epitaph. While at Rome I heard talk of another 
and grander monument which some members of the 
Keats family were to place over the dust of their 
great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this may never 
be done, even though the original stone should also 
be left there, as was intended. Let the world still 
keep unchanged this shrine, to which it can repair 
.with at once pity and tenderness and respect. 

A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling bushes grew 
upon the grave, and the roses were in bloom. We 
asked leave to take one of them ; but at last could 
only bring ourselves to gather some of the fallen 
petals. Our Hebrew guide was willing enough, and 
unconsciously set us a little example of wantonness ; 
for while he listened to our explanation of the mys- 
tery which had puzzled him ever since he had learned 
English, namely, why the stone should say "writ on 
water," and not written, he kept plucking mechan- 
ically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching away 
the leaves, and rending the tender twig, till I, re- 
membering the once -sensitive dust from w T hich it 
grew, waited for the tortured tree to cry out to 
him with a voice of words and blood, u Perche mi 
schianti ? " 

VIII. 

It seems to me that a candid person will wish to 
pause a little before condemning Gibson's colored 



ROMAN PEARLS. 169 

statues. They have been grossly misrepresented. 
They do not impress one at all as wax- work, ana 
there is great wrong in saying that their tinted na- 
kedness suggests impurity any more than the white 
nakedness of other statues. The coloring is quite 
conventional ; the flesh is merely warmed with the 
hue representing life; the hair is always a very deli- 
cate yellow, the eyes a tender violet, and there is no 
other particularization of color; a fillet binding the 
hair may be gilded, — the hem of a robe traced in 
blue. I, who had just come from seeing the frag- 
ments of antique statuary in Naples Museum, tinted 
in the same way, could not feel that there was any 
thing preposterous in Gibson's works, and I am not 
ashamed to say that they gave me pleasure. 

As we passed, in his studio, from one room to an- 
other, the workman who showed the marbles sur- 
prised and delighted us by asking if we would like to 
see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room 
where Gibson worked. He was engaged upon a 
bass-relief, — a visit of Psyche to the Zephyrs, or 
something equally aerial and mythological, — and re- 
ceived us very simply and naturally, and at once 
began with some quaint talk about the subject in 
hand. When we mentioned our pleasure in his 
colored marbles we touched the right spring, and he 
went on to speak of his favorite theory with visible 
delight, making occasional pauses to bestow a touch 
on the bass-relief, and coming back to his theme with 
that self-corroborative " Yes ! " of his, which Haw- 
thorne has immortalized. Ho was dressed with ex- 



170 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

traordinary slovenliness and indifference to clothes 
had no collar, I think, and evidently did not know 
what he had on. Every thing about him bespoke 
the utmost unconsciousness and democratic plainness 
of life, so that I could readily believe a story I heard 
of him. Having dined the greater part of his life in 
Roman restaurants, where it is but wholesome to go 
over your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork with 
your napkin before using them, the great sculptor had 
acquired such habits of neatness that at table in the 
most aristocratic house in England he absent-mind- 
edly went through all that ceremony of cleansing and 
wiping. It is a story they tell in Rome, where every 
body is anecdoted, and not always so good-naturedly. 



IX. 

One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic 
friends to visit the studio of the great German paint- 
er, Overbeck : and since I first read Uhland I have 
known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at 
this painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of 
objective Italy he treats the themes of mediaeval 
Catholicism with the most subjective feeling, and I 
thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm 
which led many Protestant German painters and 
poets of the romantic school back into the twilight 
of the Romish faith, in the hope that they might 
thus realize to themselves something of the 
nestness which animated the elder Christian artists. 
Overbeck's work is beautiful, but it is unreal, and 



ROMAN PEARLS. 171 

expresses the sentiment of no time ; as the work of 
the romantic German poets seems without relation 
to any world men ever lived in. 

Walking from the painter's house, two of us 
parted w T ith the rest on the steps of the Church of 
Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our stroll 
through the gate of San Lorenzo out upon the 
Campagna, which tempts and tempts the sojourner 
at Rome, until at last he must go and see — if it 
will give him the fever. And, alas! there I caught 
the Roman fever — the lonoino; that burns one who 
has once been in Rome to go again — that will not 
be cured by all the cool contemptuous things he 
may think or say of the Eternal City ; that fills him 
with fond memories of its fascination, and makes it 
forever desired. 

( We walked far down the dusty road beyond the 
city walls, and then struck out from the highway 
across the wild meadows of the Campagna. They 
were weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass- 
grown ditches, and deeply pitted with holes made in 
search for catacombs. There was here and there a 
farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener 
a round, hollow, roofless tomb, from which the dust 
and memory of the dead had long been blown away, 
and through the top of which — fringed and over- 
hung with grasses, and opening like a great eye — 
the evening sky looked marvelously sad. One of 
the fields was full of grim, wide-horned cattle, and 
in another there were four or five buffaloes lying 
down and chewing their cuds, — holding their heads 



172 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

horizontally in the air, and with an air of gloomy 
wickedness which nothing could exceed in their 
cruel black eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit of 
some object to toss and gore. There were also many 
canebrakes, in which the wind made a mournful 
rustling after the sun had set in golden glitter on the 
roofs of the Roman churches and the transparent 
night had fallen upon the scene. 

In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely 
know what it is makes this walk upon the Campagna 
one of my vividest recollections of Rome, unless it 
be the opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon 
that many-memoried ground as freely as if it had 
been a woods-pasture in Ohio. Nature, where his- 
tory was so august, was perfectly simple and moth- 
erly, and did so much to make me at home, that, as 
the night thickened and we plunged here and there 
into ditches and climbed fences, and struggled, heavy- 
footed, back through the suburbs to the city gate, I 
felt as if half my boyhood had been passed upon 
the Campagna. 



x. 

Pasquino, like most other great people, is not very 
interesting upon close approach. There is no trace 
now in his aspect to show that he has ever been 
satirical ; but the humanity that the sculptor gave him 
is imperishable, though he has lost all character as a 
public censor. The torso is at first glance nothing 
but a shapeless mass of stone, but the life can never 



ROMAN PEARLS. 178 

die out of that which has been shaped by art to 
the likeness of a man, and a second look restores 
the lump to full possession of form and expression. 
For this reason I lament that statues should ever 
be restored except by sympathy and imagination. 



XI. 

Regarding the face of Pompey's statue in the 
Spada Palace, I was more struck than ever with a 
resemblance to American politicians which I had 
noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of 
face not now to be found in Rome, but frequent 
enough here, and rather in the South than in the 
North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many 
Southern Congressmen that I wondered whether 
race had not less to do with producing types than 
had similarity of circumstances ; whether a republi- 
canism based upon slavery could not so far assimi- 
late character as to produce a common aspect in 
people widely separated by time and creeds, but hav- 
ing the same unquestioned habits of command, and 
the same boundless and unscrupulous ambition. 

XII. 

When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, 
rises and inundates the city, the Pantheon is one of 
the first places to be flooded — the sacristan told 
us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping, 
in its recession, the cement of the fine marbles which 



174 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

inenlst the columns, so that about their bases the 
pieces have to be continually renewed. Nothing 
vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your con- 
sciousness of these and other repairs. Bad as ruin 
is, I think I would rather have the old temple ru- 
inous in every part than restored as you find it. 
The sacristan felt the wrongs of*the place keenly, 
and said, referring to the removal of the bronze 
roof, which took place some centuries ago, " They 
have robbed us of every thing" (Ci hanno levato 
tutto) ; as if he and the Pantheon were of one blood, 
and he had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation. 

What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurk- 
ing about Rome we had given us by that group of 
peasants who had built a fire of brushwood almost 
within the portico of the Pantheon, and were cook- 
ing their supper at it, the light of the flames luridly 
painting their swarthy faces ! 

XIII. 

Poor little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has 
seldom, I imagine, known so violent a sensation as 
that it experienced when, on the day of the Immac- 
ulate Conception, the Armenian Archbishop rolled 
up to the door in his red coach. The master of the 
house had always seemed to like us ; now he ap- 
peared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, 
his whole being, and announced, " Signore, it is 
Monsignore come to take you to the Sistine Chapel 
in his carriage,'' and drew himself up in a line, as 



ROMAN PEARLS. 175 

much like a series of serving-men as possible, to 
let us pass out. There was a private carriage foi 
the ladies near that of Monsignore, for he had al- 
ready advertised us that the sex were not permitted 
to ride in the red coach. As they appeared, how- 
ever, he renewed his expressions of desolation at 
being deprived of their company, and assured them 
of his good-will with a multiplicity of smiles and 
nods, intermixed with shrugs of recurrence to his 
poignant regret. But ! In fine, it was forbidden ! 
Monsignore was in full costume, with his best ec- 
clesiastical clothes on, and with his great gold chain 
about his neck. The dress was richer than that of 
the western archbishops ; and the long white beard 
of Monsignore made him look much more like a 
Scriptural monsignore than these. He lacked, per- 
haps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother, the 
Archbishop at Venice, to whose letter of introduc- 
tion we owed his acquaintance and untiring civili- 
ties; but if a man cannot be plump and spiritual, 
he can be plump and pleasant, as Monsignore was to 
the last degree. He enlivened our ride with dis- 
course about the Armenians at Venice, equally be- 
loved of us ; and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he 
marshaled the ladies before him, and won them early 
entrance through the crowd of English people crush- 
ing one another at the door. Then he laid hold upon 
the captain of the Swiss Guard, who was swift to 
provide them with the best places ; and in nowise 
did he seem one of the uninfluential and insignificant 
priests that About describes the archbishops at Rome 



176 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

to be. According to this lively author, a Swiss guard 
was striking- back the crowd on some occasion with 
the butt of his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the 
breast. He instantly dropped upon his knees, with 
" Pardon, Eminenza ! . I thought it was a mon- 
signore ! " Even the chief of these handsome fellows 
had nothing but respect and obedience for our Arch- 
bishop. 

The gentlemen present were separated from the 
ladies, and in a very narrow space outside of the 
chapel men of every nation were penned up together. 
All talked — several priests as loudly as the rest. 
But the rudest among them were certain Germans, 
who not only talked but stood upon a seat to see 
better, and were ordered down by one of the Swiss 
with a fierce " Gciu, signore, giii! " Otherwise the 
guard kept good order in the chapel, and were no 
doubt as useful and genuine as any thing about the 
poor old Pope. What gorgeous fellows they were, 
and, as soldiers, how absurd ! The weapons they 
bore were as obsolete as the excommunication. It 
was amusing to pass one of these play^soldiers on 
guard at the door of the Vatican — tall, straight, 
beautiful, superb,. with his halberd on his shoulder — 
and then come to a real warrior outside, a little, ugly, 
red-legged French sentinel, with his Minie on his 
arm. 

Except for the singing of the Pope's choir — which 
was angelically sweet, and heavenly far above all 
praise — the religious ceremonies affected me, like 
all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Eacli 



ROMAN PEARLS. 177 

of the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a 
sonorous nose ; and was received standing by his 
brother prelates — a grotesque company of old-wom- 
anish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to 
come was Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face 
in the world. He sat with his eyes fastened upon his 
book, but obviously open at every pore to all that 
went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleam- 
ing, terrible, sidelong looks upon the people, full of 
hate and guile. 

From where I stood I saw the Pope's face only in 
profile : it was gentle and benign enough, but not 
great in expression, and the smile on it almost de- 
generated into a simper. His Holiness had a cold ; 
and his recitative, though full, was not smooth. He 
was all priest when, in the midst of the service, he 
hawked, held his handkerchief up before his face, a 
little way off, and ruthlessly spat in it ) 
12 



FORZA MAGGXORE. 



I imagine that Grossetto is not a town much 
known to travel, for it is absent from all the guide- 
books I have looked at. However, it is chief in the 
Maremma, where sweet Pia de' Tolommei Ian-, 
guished and perished of the poisonous air and her 
love's cruelty, and where, so many mute centuries 
since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, 
one may say that Grossetto is on the diligence road 
from Civita Vecchia to Leghorn, and that in the very 
heart of the place there is a lovely palm-tree, rare, 
if not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a 
well-sheltered, dull little court, out of every thing's 
way, and turns tenderly toward the wall that shields 
it on the north. It has no other company but a beau- 
tiful young girl, who leans out of a window high 
over its head, and I have no doubt talks with it. At 
the moment we discovered the friends, the maiden 
was looking pathetically to the northward, while the 
palm softly stirred and opened its plumes, as a bird 
does when his song is finished ; and there is very lit- 
tle question but it had just been singing to her that 
song of which the palms are so fond, — 

" Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam 
Im Norden auf kahler HohV 



FORZA MAGGIORE. 179 

Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this 
tree's existence, as if a hard, matter-of-fact place 
ought to be ashamed of a sentimentality of the kind. 
It pretended to be a very worldly town, and tried to 
keep us in the neighborhood of its cathedral, where 
the caffe and shops are, and where, in the evening, 
four or five officers of the garrison clinked their sa- 
bres on the stones, and promenaded up and down, 
and as many ladies shopped for gloves ; and as many 
citizens sat at the principal caffd and drank black 
coffee. This was lively enough ; and we knew that 
the citizens were talking of the last week's news and 
the Roman question ; that the ladies were really 
looking for loves, not gloves ; that such of the offi- 
cers as had no local intrigue to keep their hearts 
at rest were terribly bored, and longed for Florence 
or Milan or Turin. 

Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto 
put forth others of an artistic nature. The cathedral 
was very old and very beautiful, — built of alternate 
lines of red and white marble, and lately restored in 
the best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But it was 
not open, and we were obliged to turn from it to the 
group of statuary in the middle of the piazza, repre- 
sentative of the Maremma and Family returning 
thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany 
for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. 
The Maremma and her children are arrayed in the 
scant draperies of Allegory, but the Grand Duke is 
fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some 
surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt 



180 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

of the propriety of their public appearance in that 
state. 

There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I won- 
der what was in it ? 

The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the 
moat at its feet had been so long dry that it was only 
to be known from the adjacent fields by the richness 
of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, 
and planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful 
promenade, like most of such mediaeval defenses in 
Italy ; though I am not sure that a little military life 
did not still linger about a bastion here and there. 
From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the 
morning, to walk upon the wall, there came to us a 
throb of drums ; but I believe that the only armed 
men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were 
the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to 
Grossetto for the excellent shooting in the marshes. 
All the way to Florence we continued to meet them 
and their dogs ; and our inn at Grossetto overflowed 
with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and 
in the court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, 
and beccafichi, at which a troop of scullion-boys con- 
stantly plucked, and from which the great, noble, 
beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, 
broiled, and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these 
generous birds during our sojourn, and found, when 
we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that the very 
genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas 
beyond them. He was part of the repairs and im- 
provements which that hostelry had recently under- 



FOTIZA MAGCIORE. 181 

gone, and had evidently come in with the four- 
pronged forks, the chromo - lithographs of Victor 
Emanuel, Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the 
large dining-room, and the iron stove in the small 
one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with 
the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient 
rooms with great fire-places. He strove to give a 
Florentine blandishment to the rusticity of life in the 
Maremma ; and we felt sure that he must know 
what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he as- 
sumed to be perfectly conversant with it, started to 
bring it, paused, turned, and, with a great sacrifice 
of personal dignity, demanded, " Bifsteca di manzo, 
o bifsteca di motone ? " — " Beefsteak of beef, or 
beefsteak of mutton ? " 

Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I 
except a boy whom I heard singing after dark in the 
streets, — 

" Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi ! " 

The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of 
forza maggiore, as the agent of the diligence com- 
pany defiantly expressed it, in refusing us damages 
for our overturn into the river. It was in the early 
part of the winter when we started from Rome for 
Venice, and we were traveling northward by dili- 
gence because the railways were still more or less 
interrupted by the 'Storms and floods predicted of 
Matthieu de la Drome, — the only reliable prophet 
France has produced since Voltaire ; — and if our 
accident was caused by an overruling Providence, the 
company, according to the very law of its existence, 



182 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

was not responsible. To be sure, we did not see how 
an overruling Providence was to blame for loading 
upon our diligence the baggage of two diligences, 
or for the clumsiness of our driver ; but on the other 
hand, it is certain that the company did not make 
it rain or cause the inundation. And, in fine, 
although we could not have traveled by railway, we 
were masters to have taken the steamer instead of 
the diligence at Civita Vecchia. 

The choice of either of these means of travel had 
presented itself in vivid hues of disadvantage all the 
way from Rome to the Papal port, where the French 
steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon 
the short, chopping waves, while we approached by 
railway. We had leisure enough to make the deci- 
sion, if that was all we wanted. Our engine-driver 
had derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical 
Letter, and the train gave every promise of arriving 
at Civita Vecchia five hundred years behind time. 
But such was the desolating and depressing influence 
of the weather and the landscape, that we reached 
Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. 
On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked 
and sodden, — wild, shagged with scrubby growths 
of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and 
visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon 
their staves at an angle of forty-five degrees, and 
looking, in their immovable dejection, with their legs 
wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like satyrs that 
had been converted, and were trying to do right ; 
turning dim faces to us, they warned us with every 



PORZA MAGGIORE. 183 

mute appeal against the land, as a waste of mud 
from one end of Italy to the other. On the other 
hand, there was the sea-wind raving about our train 
and threatening to blow it over, and whenever we 
drew near the coast, heaping the waves upon the 
beach in thundering menace. 

We weakly and fearfully remembered our former 
journeys by diligence over broken railway routes ; 
we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to Naples 
by sea ; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five 
francs' worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia 
station before we knew it, and long before we had 
made up our minds. Still we might have lingered 
and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, 
but for the dramatic resolution of the old man who 
solicited passengers for the diligence, and carried 
their passports for a final Papal visa at the police- 
office. By the account he gave of himself, he was 
one of the best men in the w T orld, and unique in 
those parts for honesty and truthfulness ; and he be- 
sought us, out of that affectionate interest with which 
our very aspect had inspired him, not to go by 
steamer, but to go by diligence, which in nineteen 
hours would land us safe, and absolutely refreshed by 
the journey, at the railway station in Follonica. 
And now, once, would we go by diligence ? twice, 
would we go ? three times, would we go ? 

" Signore," said our benefactor, angrily, " I lose 
my time with you ; " and ran away, to be called 
back in the course of destiny, as he knew well 
enough, and besought to take us as a special favor. 



184 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

From the passports he learned that there was offi- 
cial dignity among us, and addressed the unworthy 
bearer of public honors as Eccellenza, and, at parting 
bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commend- 
ing us all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered 
caressingly about us as long as we remained, strain- 
ing politeness to do us some last little service ; and 
when the diligence rolled away, he did all that one 
man could to give us a round of applause. 

We laughed together at this silly old man, when 
out of sight ; but we confessed that, if travel in our 
own country ever came, with advancing corruption, 
to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it 
in Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small 
civilities also there attendant on it, — and so tried to 
console ourselves. 

At the moment of departure, we were surprised to 
have enter the diligence a fellow T -countryman, whom 
we had first seen on the road from Naples to Rome. 
He had since crossed our path with that iteration of 
travel which brings you again and again in view of 
the same trunks and the same tourists in the round 
of Europe, and finally at Civita Vecchia he had 
turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the 
agent of the diligence, and had gone off apparently 
a confirmed passenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer 
view of the sailor's hornpipe, as danced by that ves- 
sel in the harbor, shook his resolution. At any rate, 
here he was again, and with his ticket for Follonica, 
— a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and we will say 
a citizen of Portland, though he was not. For the 



FORZA MAGGIORE. 185 

first time in our long acquaintance with one another's 
faces, we entered into conversation, and wondered 
whether we should find brigands or any thing to eat 
on the road, without expectation of finding either. 
In respect of robbers, we were not disappointed ; but 
shortly after nightfall we stopped at a lonely post- 
house to change horses, and found that the landlord 
had so far counted on our appearance as to have, just 
roasted and fragrantly fuming, a leg of lamb, with 
certain small fried fish, and a sufficiency of bread. 
It was a very lonely place as I say ; the sky was 
gloomy overhead ; and the wildness of the landscape 
all about us gave our provision quite a gamy flavor ; 
and brigands could have added nothing to our sense 
of solitude. 

The road creeps along the coast for some distance 
from Civita Vecchia, within hearing of the sea, and 
nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe, all the way to 
Follonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped 
every two hours to change horses ; at which times 
we looked out, and, seeing that it was a gray and 
windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we had 
not taken the steamer. With very little change, 
the wisdom of our decision in favor of the diligence 
formed the burden of our talk during the whole 
night ; and to think of eluded sea-sickness requited 
us in the agony of our break-neck efforts to catch a 
little sleep, as, mounted upon our nightmares, we 
rode steeple-chases up and down the highways 
and by-ways of horror. Any thing that absolutely 
awakened us was accounted a blessing ; and I re- 



186 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

member few things in life with so keen a pleasure as 
the summons that came to us to descend from our 
places and cross a river in one boat, while the two 
diligences of our train followed in another. Here 
we had time to see our fellow-passengers, as the pul- 
sating light of their cigars illumined their faces, and 
to discover anions them that Italian, common to all 
large companies, who speaks English, and is very 
eager to practice it with you, — who is such a bene- 
factor if you do not know his own language, and 
such a bore if you do. After this, being landed, it 
was rapture to stroll, up and down the good road, and 
feel it hard and real under our feet, and not an abys- 
mal impalpability, while all the grim shapes of our 
dreams fled to the spectral line of small boats sus- 
taining the ferry-barge, and swaying slowly from it 
as the drowned men at their keels tugged them 
against the tide. 

" aS" accommodino, Signori ! " cries the cheerful 
voice of the conductor, and we ascend to our places 
in the diligence. The nightmares are brought out 
again ; we mount, and renew the steeple-chase as be- 
fore. 

Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide 
awake in the diligence, amid a silence only broken 
by the hiss of rain against the windows, and the 
sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands 
still ; there is no rattle of harness, nor other sound 
to prove that we have arrived at the spot by other 
means than dropping from the clouds. The idea 
that we are passengers in the last diligence destroyed 



FORZA MAGGIORE. 187 

before the Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on 
the highest ground accessible to wheels, fades away 
as the day dimly breaks, and we find ourselves 
planted, as the Italians say, on the banks of another 
river. There is no longer any visible conductor, the 
horses have been spirited away, the driver has van- 
ished. 

The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins 
to drop through upon us in great, wrathful tears, 
while the river before us rushes away with a mo- 
mently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths 
of the storm a number of rainy peasants, with our 
conductor and driver perfectly waterlogged, and 
group themselves on the low, muddy shore, near a 
flat ferry-barge, evidently wanting but a hint of 
forza maggiore to go down with any thing put into it. 
A momerkt they dispute in pantomime, sending now 
and then a windy tone of protest and expostulation 
to our ears, and then they drop into a motionless si- 
lence, and stand there in the tempest, not braving it, 
but enduring it with the pathetic resignation of their 
race, as if it were some form of hopeless political op- 
pression. At last comes the conductor to us and says, 
It is impossible for our diligences to cross in the boat, 
and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite 
shore. He expected them long before this, but we 
see ! They are not come. Patience and malediction ! 

Remaining planted in these unfriendly circum- 
stances from four o'clock till ten, we have still the 
effrontery to be glad that we did not take the steamer. 
What a storm that must be at sea ! When at last 



188 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

our connecting diligences appear on the other shore, 
we are almost light-hearted, and make a jest of the 
Ombrone, as we perilously pass it in the ferry-boat 
too weak for our diligences. Between the landing 
and the vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to 
cross, and when we reach them we find the coupe 
appointed ns occupied by three young Englishmen, 
who insist that they shall be driven to the boat. 
With that graceful superiority which endears their 
nation to the world, and makes the traveling Eng- 
lishman a universal favorite, they keep the seats to 
which they have no longer any right, while the tem- 
pest drenches the ladies to w T hom the places belong ; 
and it is only by the forza maggiore of our conductor 
that they can be dislodged. In the mean time the 
Portland man exchanges with them the assurances 
of personal and national esteem, which that mighty 
bond of friendship, the language of Shakespeare and 
Milton, enables us to offer so idiomatically to our 
transatlantic cousins. 

What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through 
it, we scarcely looked to see. In four or five hours 
we should strike the railroad at Follonica ; and we 
merely asked of intermediate places that they should 
not detain us. We. dined in Grossetto at an inn of 
the Larthian period, — a cold inn and a damp, which 
seemed never to have been swept since the broom 
dropped from the grasp of the last Etrurian cham- 
bermaid, — and we ate with the two-pronged iron 
forks of an extinct civilization. All the while we 
dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire to warm us, and 



FORZA MAGGIORE. 189 

beguiled his incessant failures with stories of inunda- 
tion on the road ahead of us. But we believed him so 
little, that when he said a certain stream near Gros- 
setto was impassable, our company all but hissed him. 

When we left the town and hurried into the open 
country, we perceived that he had only too great 
reason to be an alarmist. Every little rill was risen, 
and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the 
broad fields lay hid under the yellow waters that 
here and there washed over the road. Yet the 
freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant ex- 
citement ; and even when we came to a place where 
the road itself was covered for a quarter of a mile, 
we scarcely looked outside the diligence to see how 
deep the water was. We were surprised when our 
horses were brought to a stand on a rising ground, 
and the conductor, cap in hand, appeared at the door. 
He was a fat, well-natured man, full of a smiling good- 
will ; and he stood before us in a radiant desperation. 

Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in 
front, and decide whether to go on ? The conductor 
desired to content ; it displeased him to delay, — ma, 
in somma ! — the rest was confided to the conduct- 
or's eloquent shoulders and eyebrows. 

Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a dishearten- 
ing prospect. On every hand the country was un- 
der water. The two diligences stood on a stone 
bridge spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an 
angry torrent, brawled over a hundred yards of the 
road before us. Beyond, the ground rose, and on 
ts slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in 



190 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

water. Without the slightest hope in his purpose, 
and merely as an experiment, Eccellenza suggested 
that a man should be sent in on horseback ; which 
being done, man and horse in a moment floundered 
into swimming depths. 

The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, 
gave a great shrug of desolation. 

Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug, 
-—a shrug of sufficiently correct construction, but 
wanting the tonic accent, as one may say, though ex- 
pressing, however imperfectly, an equal desolation. 

It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go 
ahead, but to go back if we could ; and we reentered 
the water we had just crossed. It had risen a little 
meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only 
by the telegraph-poles. The diligence before us 
went safely through ; but our driver, trusting rather 
to inspiration than precedent, did not follow it care- 
fully, and directly drove us over the side of a small 
viaduct. All the baggage of the train having been 
lodged upon the roof of our diligence, the unwieldy 
vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if prepar- 
ing, like Caesar, to fall decently, and went over on its 
side with a stately deliberation that gave us ample 
time to arrange our plans for getting out. 

The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it 
was swift and muddy, and it was with a fine sense of 
shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his boots filling with 
water, while a conviction that it would have been 
better, after all, to have taken the steamer, struck 
coldly home to him. We opened the window in the 



FORZA MAGGIORE. 191 

top side of the diligence, and lifted the ladies through 
it, and the conductor, in the character of life-boat, 
bore them ashore ; while the driver cursed his horses 
in a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be di- 
verted from that employment to cut the lines and 
save one of them from drowning. 

Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the 
Englishman at the Ombrone we had lately admired, 
showed traits of strict and severe method which af- 
terward came into even bolder relief. The ladies 
being rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of 
their hats, cloaks, rubbers, muffs, books, and bags, and 
handed them up through the window with tireless 
perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each 
article in turn. The other gentleman on top received 
them all rather grimly, and had not perhaps been 
amused by the situation but for the exploit of his 
hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in En 2- 
lish slang a stove-pipe {carina)^ and having been 
made in Italy, it was of course too large for its 
wearer. It had never been any thing but a horror 
and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly 
delighted to see it steal out of the diligence in com- 
pany with one of the red-leather cushions, and glide 
darkly down the flood. It nodded and nodded to the 
cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, 
and had a preposterous air of whispering, as it 
drifted out of sight, — 

"It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles, — 
It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down." 

The romantic interest of this episode had hardly 



192 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

died away, when our adventure acquired an idyllic 
flavor from the appearance on the scene of four peas- 
ants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to en- 
gage to bring out the baggage and right the fallen 
diligence ; and they, after making him a little speech 
upon the value of their health, which might be in- 
jured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs 
for the service. The simple incident enforced the 
fact already known to us, — that, if Italians some- 
times take advantage of strangers, they are equally 
willing to prey upon each other ; but I doubt if any 
thing could have taught a foreigner the sweetness 
with which our conductor bore the enormity, and 
turned quietly from those brigands to carry the Port- 
land man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to 
the shore. 

Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of 
both diligences grouped themselves, and made merry 
over the common disaster. As the conductor and 
the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose 
with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased 
or not as we found it soaked or dry. We applauded 
and admired the greater sufferers anions: us : a ladv 
who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpe- 
trated a pleasantry ; and a Brazilian gentleman, 
whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered 
in the flood about the diligence, w T as looked upon as 
a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to 
these witty passages was the epigrammatic display 
of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people 
bring away from Rome and Naples, — copies of Pom- 



FORZA MAGGIORE. 193 

peian frescos more ruinous than the originals ; photo- 
graphs floating loose from their cards ; little earthen 
busts reduced to the lumpishness of common clay ; 
Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory 
of their recent hues ; Roman pearls clinging together 
in clammy masses. 

We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all 
crowded into one diligence and returned to Grossetto. 
Arrived there, our party, knowing that a public con- 
veyance in Italy — and everywhere else — always 
stops at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek 
another, and found it without ado, though the person 
who undertook to show it spoke of it mysteriously 
and as of difficult access, and tried to make the sim- 
ple affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could. 

We took one of the ancient rooms in which there 
was a vast fire-place, as already mentioned, and we 
there kindled such a fire as could not have been 
known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The dry- 
ing of the clothes was an affair that drew out all the 
energy and method of our compatriot, and at a late 
hour we left him moving about among the garments 
that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and 
lines, dealing with them as a physician with his sick, 
and tenderly nursing his dress-coat, which he wrung 
and shook and smoothed and pulled this way and 
that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he 
hired a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the 
steaming raiment, and, returning at four o'clock, 
found his watcher dead asleep before the empty fire- 
place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher 

13 



194 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

for this. He must have been a man of iron nerve 
to fall asleep amid all that phantasmal show of masks 
and disguises. What if those reeking silks had for- 
saken their nails, and, decking themselves with the 
blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, 
had invited the dress-coats to look over the dripping 
photographs ? Or if all those drowned garments 
had assumed the characters of the people whom they 
had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear 
the shade of Pia de' Tolommei rehearse the story of 
her sad fate in the Maremma ? I say, if a watcher 
could sleep in such company, he was right to do so. 

On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we 
gathered together our damaged effects, and packed 
them into refractory trunks. Then we held the cus- 
tomary discussion with the landlord concerning the 
effrontery of his account, and drove off once more 
toward Follonica. We could scarcely recognize the 
route for the one we had recently passed over ; and 
it was not until we came to the scene of our wreck, 
and found the diligence stranded high and dry upon 
the roadside, that we could believe the whole land- 
scape about us had been flooded three days before. 
The offending stream had shrunk back to its channel, 
and now seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its 
late excess, and had a virtuous air of not knowing 
how in the world to account for that upturned dili- 
gence. The waters, we learned, had begun to sub- 
side the night after our disaster ; and the vehicle 
might have been righted and drawn utf — for it was 



FORZA MAGGIORE. 195 

not in the least injured — forty-eight hours previ- 
ously ; but I suppose it was not en regie to touch it 
without orders from Rome. I picture it to myself 
still lying there, in the heart of the marshes, and 
thrilling sympathetic travel with the spectacle of its 
ultimate ruin : 

" Disfecemi Maremma." 

We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars 
hurried us to Leghorn. We were thoroughly hum- 
bled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt that we 
did ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead 
. of the steamer ; for we had been, not nineteen hours, 
but four days on the road, and we had suffered as 
aforementioned. 

But we were destined to be partially restored to 
our self-esteem, if not entirely comforted for our 
losses, when we sat down to dinner in the Hotel 
Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching 
the drift of our English discourse, asked us, — 

" Have the signori heard that the French steamer, 
which left Civita Vecchia the same day with their 
diligence, had to put back and lie in port more than 
two days on account of the storm ? ' She is but now 
come into Leghorn, after a very dangerous passage." 



AT PADUA. 



Those of my readers who have frequented the 
garden of Doctor Rappaccini no doubt recall with 
perfect distinctness the quaint old city of Padua. 
They remember its miles and miles of dim arcade 
over-roofing the sidewalks everywhere, affording ex- 
cellent opportunity for the flirtation of lovers by day 
and the vengeance of rivals by night. They have 
seen the now-vacant streets thronged with maskers, 
and the Venetian Podesta going in gorgeous state to 
and from the vast Palazzo della Ragione. They 
have witnessed ringing tournaments in those sad 
empty squares, and races in the Prato della Valle, 
and many other wonders of different epochs, and 
their pleasure makes me half-sorry that I shoujd 
have lived for several years within an hour by rail 
from Padua, and should know little or nothing of 
these great sights from actual observation. I take 
shame to myself for having visited Padua so often and 
so familiarly as I used to do, — for having been bored 
and hungry there, — for having had toothache there, 
upon one occasion, — for having rejoiced more in a 



AT PADUA. 197 

cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's than in the whole history 
of Padua, — for having slept repeatedly in the bad- 
bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of 
Portia, — for having been more taken by the salti 
mortali* of a waiter who summed up my account at 
a Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with 
which the city has been many times captured and re- 
captured. Had I viewed Padua only over the wall 
of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my im- 
pressions of the city would now be ! This is one of 
the drawbacks of actual knowledge. " Ah ! how 
can you write about Spain when once you have been 
there?" asked Heine of Thdophile Gautier setting 
out on a journey thither. 

Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember 
something about Padua with a sort of romantic pleas- 
ure. There was a certain charm which I can dimly 
recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of 
the city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of 
the Indian corn that flourished up so mightily from 
the dry bed of the moat. At such times 1 could not 
help figuring to myself the many sieges that the 
wall had known, with the fierce assault by day, the 
secret attack by night, the swarming foe upon the 
plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged upon 
the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of 
ropes and leather and throwing mighty balls of stone, 
the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted 

* Salti mortali are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic 
by which Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, ar- 
rive at six as the product of two and two 



198 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

against the defenses and staggering headlong into the 

O OO & ~ 

moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its 
sluggish waters, but by the blood of manv men. I 
suppose that most of these visions were old stage 
spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies 
were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements 
of warfare from museums of armor and from cabi- 
nets of antiquities ; but they were very vivid for all 
that. 

I was never able, in passing a. certain one of the 
city gates, to divest myself of an historic interest in 
the great loads of hay waiting admission on the out- 
side. For an instant they masked again the Vene- 
tian troops that, in the War of the League of Cam- 
bray, entered the city in the hay-carts, shot down 
the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the 
citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it 
was a thing long past. The German garrison was 
here again ; and the heirs of the landsknechts went 
clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with 
that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is so 
much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of 
fifes. Once more now the Germans are gone, and, 
let us trust, forever ; but when I saw them, there 
seemed little hope of their going. They had a great 
Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set 
up the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts 
of the city. 

I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on 
such a spring clay as this in the arcaded Paduan 
streets, I should catch glimpses, through the gate- 



AT PADUA. 199 

ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, 
and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were 
autumn, and I were in the great market-place before 
the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets 
of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with 
the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a 
music as if the wine itself were already singing in 
their gentle hearts. It is a great field of succulent 
verdure, that wide old market-place ; and fancy loves 
to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and 
vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant- 
women who have been bringing fruits and vegetables 
to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They 
sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and 
knit and doze, and wake up with a drowsy "Cornan- 
dala V as you linger to look at their grapes. They 
have each a pair of scales, — the emblem of Injus- 
tice, — and will weigh you out a scant measure of 
the fruit if you like. Their faces are yellow as parch- 
ment, and Time has written them so full of wrinkles 
that there is not room for another line. Doubtless 
these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and 
would tell the whole history of Padua if you could 
get at each successive inscription. Among their 
primal records there must be some account of the 
Roman city, as each little contadinella remembered 
it on market-days ; and one might read of the terror 
of Attila's sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid's 
personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper 
who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her 
hard, round red cheeks, — for in that time she was a 



200 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

blooming girl, — and paid nothing for either privi- 
lege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the 
wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the 
fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, 
of the Venetian rule ! And is it not sad to think of 
systems and peoples all passing away, and these an- 
cient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in 
front of the Palazzo della Rao-ione ? What a long 
mortality ! 

The youngest of their number is a thousand years 
older than the palace, which was begun in the twelfth 
century, and which is much the same now as it was 
when first completed. I know that, if I entered it, 
I should be sure of finding the great hall of the pal- 
ace — the vastest hall in the w r orld — dim and dull 
and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it except 
at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden 
horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the 
two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt placed 
there by Belzoni. 

Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should 
have the Court of the University all to myself, and 
might study unmolested the blazons of the noble 
youth who have attended the school in different cen- 
turies ever since 1200, and have left their escutch- 
eons on the walls to commemorate them. At the 
foot of the stairway ascending to the schools from 
the court is the statue of the learned lady who was 
once a professor in the University, and who, if her 
likeness belie not her looks, must have given a great 
charm to student life in other times. At present 



AT PADUA. 201 

there are no lady professors at Padua any more 
than at Harvard ; and during late years the schools 
have suffered greatly from the interference of the 
Austrian government, which frequently closed them 
for months, on account of political demonstrations 
among the students. But now there is an end of 
this and many other stupid oppressions ; and the 
time-honored University will doubtless regain its an- 
cient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fif- 
teen hundred students, and one met them every- 
where under the arcades, and could not well mistake 
them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy 
which these studious young men loved to assume. 
They were to be seen a good deal on the prome- 
nades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are 
driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where 
one sees the blood-horses and fine equipages for 
which Padua is famous. There used once to be 
races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian no- 
tion of horse-races ; but these are now discontinued, 
and there is nothing to be found there but the stat- 
ues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in 
a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled 
thither about dusk on such a day as this, you might 
see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigid- 
ity, and in the failing light nod to each other very 
pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in 
Padua over night, what could be better to-morrow 
morning than a stroll through the great Botanical 
Garden, — the oldest botanical garden in the world, 
— the garden which first received in Europe the 



202 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

strange and splendid growths of our hemisphere, — 
the garden where Doctor Rappaccini doubtless founa 
the germ of his mortal plant ? 

On the whole, I believe I would rather go this mo- 
ment to Padua than to Lowell or Lawrence, or even 
to Worcester ; and as to the disadvantage of having 
seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has 
now assumed so fantastic a character in my mind 
that I am almost as well qualified to write of it as if 
I had merely dreamed it. 

The day that we first visited the city was very 
rainy, and we spent most of the time in viewing the 
churches. These, even after the churches of Ven- 
ice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and 
they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of 
the Renaissance to which some of the temples of the 
latter city abandon themselves. Their architecture 
forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine 
of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The su- 
perb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of St. 
Mark's ; and the porticos of other Paduan churches 
rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards 
that fascinate with their mystery and beauty. 

It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in 
the Chapter which drew us first to St. Anthony's, 
and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally at- 
tending the contemplation of frescos discovered only 
since 1858, after having been hidden under plaster 
and whitewash for many centuries ; but we could 
not believe that Giotto's fame was destined to gain 
much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in 



AT PADUA. 203 

nowise to be compared with this master's frescos in 
the Chapel of the Annunziata, — which, indeed, is 
in every way a place of wonder and delight. You 
reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered 
with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with 
clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where 
there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor seems to 
have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous 
smell, as a sacred place should be ; a blessed bench- 
ing goes round the walls, and you sit down and take 
unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener 
leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in 
which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain 
enough. Their contemporaries and yours are cor- 
dial in their gay companionship : through the half- 
open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sun- 
shine that they saw lie there ; the deathless birds 
that they heard sing out in the garden trees ; it is 
the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hun- 
dred years ago that breathes through all the lovely 
garden grounds. 

But in the midst of this pleasant communion with 
the past, you have a lurking pain ; for you have 
hired your brougham by the hour ; and you pres-* 
ently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account. 

We had chosen our driver from among many other 
drivers of broughams in the vicinity of Pedrocchi's, 
because he had such an honest look, and was not 
likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us. 

" But first," said the signor who had selected him, 
"how much is your brougham an hour?" 



204 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

So and so. 

"Show me the tariff of fares." 

" There is no tariff." 

"There is. Show it to me." 

" It is lost, sign or." 

" I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it 
out." 

The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he 
had demanded just what the boatman of the ballad 
received in gift, — thrice his fee. 

The driver mounted his seat, and served us so 
faithfully that day in Padua that we took him the 
next day for Arqua. At the end, when he had re- 
ceived his due, and a handsome mancia besides, he 
was still unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in 
proof that he had been under-paid. On that con- 
fronted and defeated, he thanked us very cordially, 
gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us 
to ask for him when we came next to Padua and 
needed a carriage. 

From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us 
to the Church of Santa Giustina, where is a very 
famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as this 
writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here 
dismiss that subject, and with a gross and idle delight 
follow the sacristan down under the church to the 
prison of Santa Giustina. 

Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so 
little fatiguing to exercise as mere wonder ; and, for 
my own sake, I try always to wonder at things with- 
out the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the 



AT PADUA. 20n 

sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, 
though -subsequent experiences led me to look with 
grave indigestion upon the whole idea of prisons, 
their authenticity, and even their existence. 

As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the 
prison of Santa Giustina was not a hard one to swal- 
low, being only three feet wide by about ten feet in 
length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed 
five years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous 
and a long-suffering prince, whom, singularly enough, 
no historic artist has yet arisen to whitewash), and 
was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining, 
to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now 
whether the sacristan said she was dashed to death 
on the stones, or cut to pieces with knives ; but 
whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the 
ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing 
the ring, — a curiously well-preserved piece of iron- 
mongery. Within the narrow prison of the saint, 
and just under the grating, through which the sacris- 
tan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain 
of candle-drippings, — a monument to the fact that 
faith still largely exists in this doubting world. My 
own credulity, not only with regard to this prison, 
but also touching the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw 
in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of 
the sacristan, that he now took me to a well, into 
which, he said, had been cast the bones of three 
thousand Christian, martyrs. He lowered a lantern 
into the well, and assured me that, if I looked through 
a certain screen work there, I could see the bones. 



206 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

On experiment I could not see the bones, but this 
circumstance did not cause me to doubt their pres- 
ence, particularly as I did see upon the screen a 
great number of coins offered for the repose of the 
martyrs' souls. I threw down some soldi, and thus 
enthralled the sacristan. 

If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the 
driver must take him to those of Ecelino, at present 
the property of a private gentleman near by. As I 
had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great bar- 
gain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively 
interest in all the enormities of that nobleman, I 
sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor 
P . 

It depends here altogether upon the freshness or 
mustiness of the reader's historical reading whether 
he cares to be reminded more particularly who Ece- 
lino was. He flourished baleful ly in the early half 
of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, 
Padua, and Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to 
death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan. He 
was in every respect a remarkable man for that time, 
— fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy, 
and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived 
and suppressed innumerable conspiracies, escaping 
even the thrust of the assassin whom the fame of his 
enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the 
Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua 
he was more incredibly severe and bloody in his rule 
than as lord of the other cities, for the Paduans had 
been latest free, and conspired the most frequently 



AT PADUA. 207 

against him. He extirpated whole families on sus- 
picion that a single member had been concerned in 
a meditated revolt. Little children and helpless 
women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his 
hands. Six prisons in Padua were constantly fdled 
by his arrests. The whole country was traversed by 
witnesses of his cruelties, — men and women de- 
prived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to 
door. He had long been excommunicated ; at last 
the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and 
his lieutenant and nephew — more demoniacal, if 
possible, than himself — was driven out of Padua 
while he was operating against Mantua. Ecelino 
retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against 
the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a cour- 
age which never failed him. Wounded and taken 
prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army gathered 
about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon 
him ; and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet 
had been cut off by Ecelino's command, dealt the 
helpless monster four blows upon the head with a 
scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of 
these w T ounds alone ; but by others it is related that 
his death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he him- 
self put the case past surgery by tearing off the 
bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines. 



ii. 

Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa 
P , we found ourselves in a realm of wonder. 



208 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

It was our misfortune not to see the magician who 
compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but 
for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest 
sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the 
evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, 
which everywhere tended to a monumental and mor- 
tuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, 
and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. 
The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscrip- 
tions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy 
and piety of all ages concerning life and death ; we 
began with Confucius, and we ended with Benja- 
mino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality 
were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor 

p ] ia( j collected into earthen amphorce the ashes 

of the most famous men of ancient and modern times, 
and arranged them so that a sense of their number 
and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each 
jar was conspicuously labeled with the name its il- 
lustrious dust had borne in life ; and if one escaped 
with comparative cheerfulness from the thought that 
Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the 
cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of 
his mortality. 

We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of 
these objects broken by the custodian, who ap- 
proached to ask if we wished to see the prisons of 
Ecelino, and w T e willingly followed him into the rain 
out of our sepulchral shelter. 

Between the vestibule and the towers of the ty- 
rant, lay that garden already mentioned, and our guide 



AT PADUA 209 

led us through ranks of weeping statuary, and rainy 
bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we 
reached the door of his cottage. While he entered 
to fetch the key to the prisons, we noted that the 
towers were freshly painted and in perfect repair; 
and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on re- 
appearing, that they were merely built over the pris- 
ons on the site of the original towers. The storied 
stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps through the 
grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, 
a yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The 
towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no un- 
pleasing feature of what must be, in spite of Signor 

P , a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather. 

The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and 
this inequality gives an additional picturesqueness to 
the place. But as we were come in search *of hor- 
rors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and has-, 
tened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. 
The custodian, lighting a candle, (which ought, we 
felt, to have been a torch,) went before. 

We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not 
uncomfortable, and the guide conceded that they had 
undergone some repairs since Ecelino's time. But 
all the horrors for which we had come were there in 
perfect grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor 
P with Latin inscriptions. 

In the first cell w r as a shrine of the Virgin, set in 

the wall. Beneath this, while the wretched prisoner 

knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened and precipitated 

him upon the points of knives, from which his body 

14 



210 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

fell into the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, 
held by some rusty iron rings to the wall, was a skel- 
eton, hanging by the wrists. 

" This," said the guide, " was another punishment 
of which Ecelino was very fond." 

A dreadful doubt seized my mind. " Was this 
skeleton found here ? " I demanded. 

Without faltering an instant, without so much as 
winking an eye, the custodian replied, "Appunto" 

It was a great relief, and restored me to confi- 
dence in the establishment. I am at a loss to ex- 
plain how my faith should have been confirmed 
afterwards by coming upon a guillotine — an awful 
instrument in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a 
decapitated wooden figure under its blade — which 
the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement 

placed there by Signor P . Yet my credulity 

was so strengthened by his candor, that I accepted 
without hesitation the torture of the water-drop 
when we came to it. The water-jar was as well pre- 
served as if placed there but yesterday, and the 
skeleton beneath it — found as we saw it — was en- 
tire and perfect. 

In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton — found as we 
saw it — with its neck in the clutch of the garrote, 
which was one of Ecelino's more merciful punish- 
ments ; while in still another cell the ferocity of the 
tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the 
wretch whose skeleton had been hano-ino; for an;es — 
as we saw it — head downwards from the ceiling. 

Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dun 



AT PADUA. 211 

geon, stood a heavy oblong wooden box, witlr two 
apertures near the top, peering through which we 
found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets 
of a skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured 
the victim we beheld there, and left him to perish in 
view of the platters of food and goblets of drink 
placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The 
food we saw was of course not the original food. 

At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa 

P , the supreme excess of Ecelino's cruelty. 

The guide entered the cell before us, and, as we 
gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper 
vividly upon a block that stood in the middle of the 
floor. Fixed to the block by an immense spike driven 
through from the back was the little slender hand of 
a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck 
from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so 
many centuries, was still as perfectly preserved as if 
it had been embalmed. The sight had a most cruel 
fascination ; and while one of the horror-seekers 
stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of 
unknown dread, — the shrinking, shrieking woman 
dragged to the block, the wild, shrill, horrible screech 
following the blow that drove in the spike, the mer- 
ciful swoon after the mutilation, — his companion, 
with a sudden pallor, demanded to be taken instantly 
away. 

In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a 
few detached instruments of torture, — all original 
Ecelinos, but intended for the infliction of minor and 
comparatively unimportant torments, — and then 
they passed from that place of fear. 



212 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 



III. 



In the evening we sat talking at the Caffe Pe- 
droechi with an abbate, an acquaintance of ours, who 
was a Professor in the University of Padua. Pe- 
drocchi's is the great caff£ of Padua, a granite edifice 
of Egyptian architecture, which is the mausoleum of 
the proprietor's fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at 
the feast, however, does not much trouble the guests. 
They begin early in the evening to gather into the 
elegant saloons of the caffe, — somewhat too large 
for so small a city as Padua, — and they sit there 
late in the night over their cheerful cups and their 
ices, with their newspapers and their talk. Not so 
many ladies are to be seen as at the caffd in Venice, 
for it is only in the greater cities that they go much 
to these public places. There are few students at 
Pedrocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper caffe ; but 
you may nearly always find there some Professor of 
the University, and on the evening of which I speak 
there were two present besides our abbate. Our 
friend's great passion was the English language, 
which he understood too well to venture to speak a 
great deal. He had been translating from that 
tongue into Italian certain American poems, and our 
talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk 
of distinguished American writers, of whom intelli- 
gent Italians always know at least four, in this suc- 
cession, — Cooper, Mrs. Stowe, Longfellow, and Ir- 
ving. Mrs. Stowe's Capanna di Zio Tom is, of course^ 



AT PADUA. 213 

universally read ; and my friend had also read 11 
More di Maggio, — "The May-flower," Of Long- 
fellow, the " Evangeline " is familiar to Italians, 
through a translation of the poem ; but our abbate 
knew all the poet's works, and one of the other pro 
fessors present that evening had made such faithful 
study of them as to have produced some translations 
rendering the original with remarkable fidelity and 
spirit. I have before me here his brochure, printed 
last year at Padua, and containing versions of " En- 
celadus," " Excelsior," " A Psalm of Life," " The 
Old Clock on the Stairs," " Sand of the Desert in 
an Hour-Glass," " Twilight," " Daybreak," " The 
Quadroon Girl," and " Torquemada," — pieces 
which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's 
lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor 
Messadaglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge of 
his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma, now 
unhappily no more, lately published a translation of 
" The Golden Legend ; " and Professor Messadaglia, 
in his Preface, mentions a version of another of 
our poet's longer works on which the translator of 
the " Evangeline " is now engaged. 

At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the 
gentle abbate of our day's adventures, and eagerly 
related that of the Ecelino prisons. To have seen 
them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives. 

" Eh ! " said our friend, " I believe you." 

" We mean those under the Villa P -." 

" Exactly." 



214 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

There was a tone of politely suppressed amuse- 
ment in the abbate's voice ; and after a moment's 
pause, in which we felt our awful experience slip- 
ping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, 
" You don't mean that those are not the veritable 
Ecelino prisons ? " 

" Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The 
Ecelino prisons were destroyed when the Crusaders 
took Padua, with the exception of the tower, which 
the Venetian Republic converted into an observa- 
tory." 

" But at least these prisons are on the site of Ece- 
lino's castle ? " 

" Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case 
would have been outside of the old city walls." 

" And those tortures and the prisons are all " — 

" Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino 
used such things, and many worse, of which even 

the ingenuity of Sign or P cannot conceive. But 

he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, 
and what he can do to realize them he has done in 
his prisons." 

" But the custodian — how could he lie so ? " 

Our friend shrugged his shoulders. " Eh ! easily. 
And perhaps he even believed what he said." 

The world began to assume an aspect of bewilder- 
ing ungenuineness, and there seemed to be a treach- 
erous quality of fiction in the ground under our feet. 
Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale, 
where we went to pass the rest of the evening, 



AT PADUA. 215 

appeared hollow and improbable. We thought the 
hero something of a bore, with his patience and 
goodness ; and as for the heroine, pursued by the at- 
tentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she 
were any better than she should be. 



A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE 
AT ARQUA. 



We said, during summer days at Venice, when 
every campo was a furnace seven times heated, and 
every canal was filled with boiling bathers, " As soon 
as it rains we will go to Arqua." Remembering the 
ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of 
plain, we could not think of them in August with- 
out a sense of dust clogging every pore, and eyes 
that shrank from the vision of their blinding white- 
ness. So we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, 
until the summer had almost lapsed into autumn ; 
and as the weather cooled before any rain reached us, 
we took the moisture on the main-land for granted, 
and set out under a cloudy and windy sky. 

We had to go to Padua by railway, and take car- 
riage thence to Arqua upon the road to Ferrara. I 
believe no rule of human experience was violated 
when it began to rain directly after we reached 
Padua, and continued to rain violently the w T hole 
day. We gave up this day entirely to the rain, and 
did not leave Padua until the following morning, 
when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch's 
house actually began. 



A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE, 217 

The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it 
was already too late in the season for the summer to 
recover herself with the elastic brilliancy that follows 
the rain of July or early August ; and there was I 
know not what vague sentiment of autumn in the 
weather. There was not yet enough of it to stir the 

" Tears from the depth of some divine despair ; " 

but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe 
death is not glorified to the foliage as in our own 
land), in the purple of the ripening grapes, and in 
the tawny grass of the pastures, there was autumn 
enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly 
affected the tone of the landscape, to lay upon us 
the gentle and pensive spell of its presence. Of all 
the days in the year I would have chosen this to go 
pilgrim to the house of Petrarch. 

The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's 
house is built, are those mellow heights which you 
see when you look southwest across the lagoon at 
Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in 
clear weather silver, and the October sunset loves 
them. They rise in tender azure before you as you 
issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in 
loveliness as you draw nearer to them from the rich 
plain that washes their feet with endless harvests 
of oil and wine. 

Oh beauty that will not let itself be told ! Could 
I not take warning from another, and refrain from 
this fruitless effort of description ? A friend in Padua 
had lent me Disraeli's " Venetia," because a passage 



218 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

of the story occurs in Petrarch's house at Arqua, 
and we carried the volumes with us on our pilgrim- 
age. I would here quote the description of the vil- 
lage, the house, and the hills from this work, as fault- 
lessly true, and as affording no just idea of either ; 
but nothing of it has remained in my mind except 
the geological fact that the hills are a volcanic range. 
To tell the truth, the landscape, as Ave rode along, 
continually took my mind off the book, and I could 
not give that attention either to the elegant language 
of its descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born 
characters, which they deserved. I was even more 
interested in the disreputable-looking person who 
mounted the box beside our driver directly we got 
out of the city gate, and who invariably commits this 
infringement upon your rights in Italy, no matter 
how strictly and cunningly you frame your contract 
that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage 
but yourself. He does not seem to be the acquaint- 
ance of the driver, for they never exchange a word, 
and he does not seem to pay any tiling for the ride. 
He got down, in this instance, just before we reached 
the little town at which our driver stopped, and asked 
us if we wished to drink a glass of the wine of the 
country. We did not, but his own thirst seemed to 
answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at 
our cost. 

The fields did not present the busy appearance 
which had delighted us on the same road in the 
spring, but they had that autumnal charm already 
mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear; the 



A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 219 

red grapes were already purple, and the white 
grapes pearly ripe, and they formed a gorgeous neck- 
lace for the trees, around which they clung in opu- 
lent festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts 
than this southern splendor, were the russet fields 
of Indian corn, and> scattered among the shrunken 
stalks, great nuggets of the " harmless gold " of 
pumpkins. 

At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you 
turn off to go to Arqua) there was a fair, on the 
blessed occasion of some saint's day, and there were 
many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements, 
toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like. There 
was a great crowd and a noise, but, according to the 
mysterious Italian custom, nobody seemed to be buy- 
ing or selling. I am in the belief that a small pur- 
chase of grapes we made here on our return was the 
great transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat 
operation in alms achieved at our expense by a men- 
dicant villager may be classed commercially. 

When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Bat- 
taglia we were only three miles from Arqua. 

ii. 

Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of 
the hill on which the village was stretched asleep in 
the tender sunshine, there was on either side of the 
road a stream of living water. There was no other 
barrier than this between the road and the fields 
(unless the vines swinging from tree to tree formed 



220 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

a barrier), and, as if in graceful excuse for the inter- 
position of even these slender streams, Nature had 
lavished such growth of wild flowers and w r ild berries 
on the banks that it w r as like a garden avenue, 
through the fragrance and beauty of which we rolled, 
delighted to silence, almost to sadness. 

When we began to climb the hill to ArquA, and 
the driver stopped to breathe his horse, I got out and 
finished the easy ascent on foot. The great marvel 
to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on 
which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be 
there yet, and always. It had the rare and sadden- 
ing beauty of evanescence, and awoke in me the 
memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroid- 
ered the landscape with the silver threads of west- 
ern streams, and bordered it with Ohio hills. Ohio 
hills? When I looked again it was the storied Eu- 
ganean group. But what trans-oceanic bird, voyag- 
ing hither, dropped from its mouth the blackberry 
which took root and grew and blossomed and ripened, 
that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills ? 

I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road 
from his house just above ? I figured him coming 
to meet me with his book in his hand, in his rever- 
end poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that 
curious kind of bandaging which he seems to have 
been fond of — looking, in a word, for all the world 
like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures. 

Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a 
robeless, laureless lout, who belonged at the village 
inn. Yet this lout, though not Petrarch, had merits. 



A PILGRTMAGE TO PETRARCH ? S HOUSE. 221 

His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from his 
knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze ; he 
wore a mountain cap with a long tasseled fall to the 
back of it ; his face was comely and his eye beauti- 
ful ; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing 
that a colt or young bullock could not have been bet- 
ter company. He merely ottered to guide us to Pe- 
trarch's house, and was silent, except when spoken 
to, from that instant. 

I am here tempted to say : Arqua is in the figure 
of a man stretched upon the hill slope. The head, 
which is Petrarch's house, rests upon the summit. 
The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in 
one direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. 
It is a very lank and shambling figure, without ele- 
gance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last 
wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout up 
the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in 
the general likeness of a street. World-old stone 
cottages crouch on either side ; here and there is a 
more ambitious house in decay ; trees wave over the 
street, and down its distance comes an occasional 
donkey-cart very musically and leisurely. By all 
odds, Arqua and its kind of villages are to be pre- 
ferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy 
cling to the white-hot highway without a tree to 
shelter them, and bake and burn there in the merci- 
less sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are crowded 
as thickly together $s city houses, and these wretched 
little villages do their worst to unite the discomforts 
of town and .country with a success dreadful to think 



222 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

of. In all countries villages are hateful to the heart 
of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder 
that one stone of them rests upon another. 

We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian 
had arrived to admit us, and stood before the high 
stone wall which shuts in the front of the Jiouse, and 
quite hides it from those without. This wall bears 
the inscription, Casa JPetrarca, and a marble tablet 
lettered to the following effect : — 

SE TI AGITA 

SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA, 

T' IN CHINA A QUESTE MURA 

OVE SPIRO LA GRAND' ANIMA, 

IL CANTOR DEI SCIl'IONI 

E DI LAURA. 

Which may be translated : u If thou art stirred by 
love of country, bow to these walls, whence passed 
the great soul, the singer of the Scipios and of 
Laura." 

Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the 
youths of Arqua, who had kindly attended our prog- 
ress in gradually increasing numbers from the moment 
we had entered the village. They were dear little 
girls and boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt 
faces and the gentle and the winning ways native to 
this race, which Nature loves better than us of the 
North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, 
and they evidently took us for Tedeschi. You learn 
to submit to this fate in Northern Italy, however un- 
gracefully, for it is the one that constantly befalls 
you outside of the greatest cities. The people know 
but two varieties of foreigners — the Englishman 



A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 223 

and the German. If, therefore, you have not rosbif 
expressed in every lineament of your countenance ; 
if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick, 
and your clothes are not reduced in color to the in- 
variable and maddening tone .of the English tweed, — 
you must resign yourself to be a German. All this 
is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its eagle 
in every land and to be known as American, with 
star-spangled conspicuousness all over the world : 
but it cannot be helped. I vainly tried to explain 
the geographical, political, and natural difference 
between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian 
of Petrarch's house. She listened with amiability, 
shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, and said, in her 
rude Venetian, "Mi no so rniga" (I don't know 
at all). 

Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celeb- 
rity of a poet on the spot where he lived and died, 
— on his very hearthstone, as it were. So I asked 
the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting 
his weight from one foot to the other, — 

" When did Petrarch live here ? ' 

" Ah ! I don't remember him." 

"Who was he?" 

"A poet, signor." 

Certainly the first response was not encouraging, 
but the last revealed that even to the heavy and 
clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of the poet 
had penetrated — and he a lout in the village where 
Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He 
did not know when Petrarch had lived there, — a 



224 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

year ago, perhaps, or many centuries, — but he knew 
that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of clou'>t was 
lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to 
some observations on the weather offered by a rustic 
matron who was pitching manure on the little hill- 
slope near the house. When, at last, the custodian 
came and opened the gate to us, we entered a little 
grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Pe- 
trarch's door. A few flowers grew wild among the 
grass, and a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the 
wall. The figs on it were green, though they hung 
ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arqua. 
Some ivy clung to the stones, and from this and the 
fig-tree, as we came away, we plucked memorial 
leaves, and blended them with flowers which the 
youth of Arqua picked and forced upon us for re- 
membrance. 

A quaint old door opened into the little stone 
house, and admitted us to a kind of w T ide passage-way 
with rooms on either side ; and at the end opposite 
to which we entered, another door opened upon a 
balcony. From this balcony we looked down on Pe- 
trarch's garden, which, presently speaking, is but a 
narrow space with more fruit than flowers in it. Did 
Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden ? For 
me I should better have liked a chair on the balcony, 
with the further and lovelier prospect on every hand 
of village-roofs, sloping hills all gray with olives, and 
the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from heaven 
to heaven below. 

The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now 



A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 225 

very faintly) in illustration of the loves of Petrarch 
and Laura, with verses from the sonnets inscribed to 
explain the illustrations. In all these Laura prevails 
as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff move- 
ments, and Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily 
in his hand, contemplates the flower in mingled bot- 
any and toothache. There is occasionally a startling 
literalness in the way the painter has rendered some 
of the verses. I remember with peculiar interest 
the illustration of a lachrymose passage concerning 
a river of tears, wherein the weeping Petrarch, 
stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small 
creek of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood 
with the torrent from his eyes. I attribute these 
frescos to a later date than that of the poet's resi- 
dence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom 
inside of the chamber, was of his own time, and 
taken from him — the custodian said. As it seemed 
to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did not 
remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to 
the walls of the chamber, which were thickly over- 
scribbled with names. They were nearly all Italian, 
and none English so far as I saw. This passion for 
allying one's self to the great, by inscribing one's 
name on places hallowed by them, is certainly very 
odd; and (I reflected as I added our names to the 
rest) it is, without doubt, the most impertinent and 
idiotic custom in the world. People have thus writ- 
ten themselves down, to the contempt of sensible 
futurity, all over Petrarch's house. 

The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just 

15 



226 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

as in the poet's time ; some rooms beyond it had 
been restored : the kitchen at its side was also re- 
paired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered 
the dining-room, which was comparatively large and 
lofty, with a mighty and generous fire-place at one 
end, occupying the whole space left by a balcony- 
window. The floor was paved with tiles, and the 
window-panes were round and small, and set in lead 
— like the floors and window-panes of all the other 
rooms. A gaudy fresco, representing some indeli- 
cate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-place, 
which sloped expanding from the ceiling and termi- 
nated at the mouth without a mantel-piece. The 
chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters in 
the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the 
village inn prattled less eloquently. 

From this dining-room opens, to the right, the 
door of the room which they call Petrarch's library ; 
and above the door, set in a marble frame, with a 
glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's cat, 
except the hair. Whether or not the fur was found 
incompatible with the process of embalming, and 
therefore removed, or whether it has slowly dropped 
away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know ; 
but it is certain the cat is now quite hairless, and has 
the effect of a wash-leather invention in the likeness 
of a young lamb. On the marble slab below there 
is a Latin inscription, said to be by the great poet 
himself, declaring this cat to have been wi second only 
to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues 
to have been rare enough ; and cannot well figure to 



A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCEl'S HOUSE. 227 

oimsetves Petrarch sitting before that wide-mouthed 
(ire-place, without beholding also the gifted cat that 
purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or, 
with thickened tail and lifted back, parades loftily 
round his chair in the haughty and disdainful manner 
of cats. 

In the library, protected against the predatory en- 
thusiasm of visitors by a heavy wire netting, are the 
desk and chair of Petrarch, which I know of no form 
of words to describe perfectly. The front of the 
desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most 
of which have been carried away. The chair is 
wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is gone, and 
it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Pe- 
trarch died in this chair while he sat writing at his 
desk in the little nook lighted by a single window 
opening on the left from his library. He loved to 
sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out 
for a moment, but I know he returned directly after 
I withdrew. 

On one wall of the library (which is a simple ob- 
long room, in nowise remarkable) was a copy of verses 
in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the wall opposite a 
tribute from Alfieri, both manu proprid. Over and 
above these are many other scribblings ; and hang- 
ing over the door of the poet's little nook was a crim- 
inal French lithograph likeness of " Pe*trarque " 
when young. 

Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the wall, 
while those of Cesarotti are on paper, and framed. 
I do not remember any reference to his visit to Pe- 



228 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

trarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the 
visit must have taken place in 1783, when he so- 
journed at Padua, and " made the acquaintance of 
the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively and court- 
eous manners he was no less satisfied than he had 
always been in reading his (Cesarotti's) most mas- 
terly version of 6 Ossian.' " It is probable that the 
friends visited the house together. At any rate, I 
care to believe that while Cesarotti sat "composing" 
his tribute comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetu- 
ous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to scrawl 
its inspirations on the plastering. 

Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that 
just before this visit Alfieri had heard in Venice of 
the " peace between England and the United Colo- 
nies," and that he then and there " wrote the fifth 
ode of the 6 America Libera,'" and thus finished 
that poem ? 

After copying these verses we returned to the 
dining-room, •and while one pilgrim strayed idly 
through the names in the visitor's book, the other 
sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Pe- 
trarch's inkstand of bronze — a graceful little thing, 
having a cover surmounted by a roguish cupid, while 
the lower part is supported on three lion's claws, and 
just above the feet, at either of the three corners, 
is an exquisite little female bust and head. Thus 
sketching and idling, we held spell-bound our friends 
the youth of Arqua, as well as our driver, who, hav- 
ing brought innumerable people to see the house of 
Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonish- 
ment, beheld the inside of it himself. 



A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 229 

As to the authenticity of the house I think there 
can be no doubt, and as to the genuineness of the 
relics there, nothing; in the world could shake my 
faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes 
them as "superstitions." The great poet was sixty- 
five years old when he came to rest at Arqua, and 
when, in his own pathetic words, " there remained 
to him only to consider and to desire how to make a 
good end." He says further, at the close of his au- 
tobiography: "In one of the Euganean hills, near 
to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have built me 
a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst 
of slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly 
sufficient for a family not large and discreet. Here 
I lead my life, and although, as I have said, infirm 
of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements, 
without distractions, without cares, reading always, 
and writing and praising God, and thanking God as 
well for evil as for good ; which evil, if I err not, is 
trial merely and not punishment. And all the while 
I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my 
life, and have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even 
forget my youthful sins ; wherefore, in this solitude, 
no words are so sweet to my lips as these of the 
psalm : ' Delicta juventutis mece, et ignorantias meas ne 
memineris.' And with every feeling of the heart I 
pray God, when it please Him, to bridle my thoughts, 
so long unstable and erring ; and as they have vainly 
wandered to many things, to turn them all to Him 
— only true, certain, immutable Good." 

I venerate the house at Arqua because these 



230 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

sweet and solemn words were written in it. We left 
its revered shelter (after taking a final look from me 
balcony down upon " the slopes clothed with vines 
and olives ") and returned to the 'lower village, 
where, in the court of the little church, we saw the 
tomb of Petrarch — " an ark of red stone, upon four 
columns likewise of marble." The epitaph is this: — 

Frigida Francisci lapis hie tegit ossa Petrarcae ; 
Suscipe, Virgo parens, animara ; sate Virgine, parce 
Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce." 

A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. 
The housekeeper of the parish priest, who ran out to 
enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me a wild lo- 
cal tradition of an attempt on the part of the Flor- 
entines to steal the bones of Petrarch away from 
Arqua, in proof of which she showed me a block of 
marble set into the ark, whence she said a fragment 
had been removed by the Florentines. This local 
tradition I afterwards found verified, with names and' 
dates, in a little " Life of Petrarch," by F. Leoni, 
published at Padua in 1843. It appears that this 
curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful 
honor to the great citizen whose hereditary civic 
rights they restored too late (about the time he was 
drawing nigh his " good end " at Arqua), was made 
for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named 
Tommaso Martinelli. He had a general instruction 
from his employers to bring away from Arqua " any 
important thing of Petrarch's " that he could ; and 
it occurred to this ill-advised friar to " move his 
bones." He succeeded on a night of the year 163C 



A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 231 

in stealing the dead poet's arm. The theft being at 
once discovered, the Venetian Republic rested not 
till the thief was also discovered ; but what became 
of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk neither the 
Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arqua give any 
account. The Republic removed the rest of Pe- 
trarch's body, which is now said to be in the Royal 
Museum of Madrid. 

I was willing to know more of this quaint village of 
Arqua, and I rang at the parish priest's door to beg 
of him some account of the place, if any were printed. 
But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for a 
nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It 
is but a quiet life men lead in Arqua, and their souls 
are in drowsy hands. The amount of sleep which 
this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed at 9 p. 
m. and rises at 9 a. m., with a nap of three hours dur- 
ing the day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good di- 
gestion, and uneventful days. As I turned this notion 
over in my mind, my longing to behold his reverence 
increased, that I might read life at Arqua in the 
smooth curves of his well-padded countenance. 1 
thought it must be that his " bowels of compas- 
sion were well-rounded," and, making sure of abso- 
lution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, 
to improve the occasion by confessing one or two of 
my blackest sins. 

Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a sec- 
ond visit to Arqua, I succeeded in finding this excel- 
lent ecclesiastic wide awake at two o'clock in the 
afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at 



232 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

tlmt hour ? Justice to him, I think, demands this 
admission of me. He was not at all a fat priest, as 
I had prefigured him, but rather of a spare person, 
and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village 
inn, after listening half an hour to a discourse on 
nothing but white wine from a young priest, who had 
stopped to drink a glass of it, I was put in the way 
of seeing the priest of Arqua by the former's court- 
esy. Happily enough, his reverence chanced to 
have the very thing I wanted to see —no other than 
Leoni's " Life of Petrarch," to which I have already 
referred. Courtesy is the blood in an Italian's veins, 
and I need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arqua, 
seeing my interest in the place, w r as very polite and 
obliging. But he continued to sleep throughout our 
first stay in Arqua, and I did not see him then. 

I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, 
and chiefly devoted myself to watching the young 
women who were washing clothes at the stream run- 
ning from the " Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms 
and legs were bronzed and bare, and they chattered 
and laughed gayly at their work. Their wash-tubs 
were formed by a long marble conduit from the foun- 
tain ; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping con- 
duit-sides ; and they thrashed and beat the garments 
clean upon the smooth stone. To a girl, their waists 
were broad and their ankles thick. Above their fore- 
heads the hair was cut short, and their " back hair " 
was gathered into a mass, and held together by a 
converging circle of silver pins. 

The Piazza della Fontana, in Arqua, is a place 



A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 233 

some fifty feet in length and breadth, and seems to 
be a favorite place of public resort. In the evening, 
doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with 
workers. It may be that then his reverence, risen 
from his nap, saunters by, and pauses long enough to 
chuck a pretty girl under the chin or pinch an ur- 
chin's cheek. 

Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to 
the inn, and we sat down to a chicken stewed in oil 
and a stoup of the white wine of Arqua. It was 
a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it 
savory, and the wine was both good and strong. 
While w r e lingered over the repast we speculated 
somewhat carelessly whether Arqua had retained 
among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheap- 
ness of which you read much. When our landlord 
leaned over the table and made out our account on 
it with a bit of chalk, the bill was as follows : — 

Soldi. 
Chicken . * . . . . 70 

Bread ...... 8 

Wine ....... 20 

Total . . . .98 

It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have 
bought the same chicken in Venice for half the 
money ; which is but another proof that the demand 
of the producer is often much larger than the supply 
of the corfsumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply 
you must not purchase it where raised, — 



234 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

. . . " On misty mountain ground, 
Its own vast shadow glory crowned," — 

but rather in a large city after it has been transported 
forty miles or more. Not that we begrudged the 
thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid it cheerfully, as 
well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant and 
neat little wife, who kept the wdiole inn so sweet and 
clean ; and w r e bade them a most cordial farewell as 
we drove away from their door. 



in. 

Returning, we stopped at the great castle of the 
Obizzi (now the property of the Duke of Modena), 
through which we were conducted by a surly and 
humorous custode, whose pride in life was that castle 
and its treasures, so that he resented as a personal 
affront the slightest interest in any thing else. He 
stopped us abruptly in the midst of the museum, 
and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities 
around him, demanded : 

" Does this castle please you ? " Then, with a 
scornful glance at us, " Your driver tells me you 
have been at Arqua ? And what did you see at 
Arqua ? A shabby little house and a cat without 
any hair on. I would not," said this disdainful cus- 
tode, " go to Arqua if you gave me a lemonade." 



A VISIT TO THE CIMBEL 



I had often heard in Venice of that ancient peo- 
ple, settled in the Alpine hills about the pretty town 
of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom common fame de- 
clares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of 
Rome, broken up in battle, and dispersed along the 
borders of North Italy, by Marius, many centuries 
ago. So when the soft September weather came, 
last year, we sallied out of Venice, in three, to make 
conquest of whatever was curious in the life and tra- 
ditions of these mountaineers, who dwell in seven 
villages, and are therefore called the people of the 
Sette Communi among their Italian neighbors. We 
went fully armed with note-book and sketch-book, 
and prepared to take literary possession of our con- 
quest. 

From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, 
it is two hours ; and thence one must take a carriage 
to Bassano (which is an opulent and busy little grain 
mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty 
miles north of Venice). We were very glad of the 
ride across the country. By the time we reached 
the town it was nine o'clock, and moonlight, and as 
we glanced out of our windows we saw the quaint 
up-and-down-hill streets peopled with promenaders, 



236 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

and every body in Bassano seemed to be making love, 
Young girls strolled about the picturesque ways with 
their lovers, and tender couples were cooing at the 
doorways and windows, and the scene had all that 
surface of romance with which the Italians contrive 
to varnish the real commonplaceness of their life. 
Our ride through the twilight landscape had pre- 
pared us for the sentiment of Bassano ; we had 
pleased ourselves with the spectacle of the peasants 
returning from their labor in the fields, led in troops 
of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed, bare- 
legged maids ; and we had reveled in the moment- 
ary lordship of an old walled town we passed, which 
at dusk seemed more Gothic and Middle-Age than 
any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and tur- 
rets and battlements in great plenty. *\Vhat town 
it was, or what it had been doing there so many ages, 
I have never sought to know, and I should be sorry 
to learn any thing about it. 

The next morning we began those researches for 
preliminary information concerning the Cimbri which 
turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew near the 
lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge 
relating to them diffused itself into shadowy conject- 
ure. The barber and the bookseller differed as to 
the best means of getting to the Sette Communi, and 
the caffetiere at whose place we took breakfast knew 
nothing at all of the road, except that it was up the 
mountains, and commanded views of scenery which, 
verily, it would not grieve us to see. As to the 
Cimbri, he only knew that they had their own Ian- 



A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 237 

guage, which was yet harder than the German. The 
German was hard enough, but the Cimbrian ! Oorpo ! 

At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oli- 
ero, a town some miles further up the Brenta, we 
determined to go there, and it was a fortunate 
thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge 
of the cave who told us exactly how to reach the 
Sette Communi. You pass a bridge to get out of 
Bassano — a bridge which spans the crystal swift- 
ness of the Brenta, rushing down to the Adriatic 
from the feet of the Alps" on the north, and full of 
voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to 
Oliero was the finest mountain scenery, Brenta- 
washed, and picturesque with ever-changing lines. 
Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and tobacco, which 
is guarded in the fields by soldiers for the monopo- 
list government. Farm-houses dot the valley, and 
now and then we passed villages, abounding in blonde 
girls, so rare elsewhere in Italy, but here so numer- 
ous as to give Titian that type from whicli he 
painted. 

At Oliero we learned not only which was the 
road to the Sette Communi, but that we were in it, 
and it was settled that we should come the next day 
and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, 
who for his breakfast and dinner, and what else we 
pleased, offered to accompany us. We were early 
at Oliero on the following morning, and found our 
friend in waiting ; he mounted beside our driver, 
and we rode up the Brenta to the town of Valstagna 
where our journey by wheels ended, and where we 



238 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

were to take mules for the mountain ascent. Our 
guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may as well 
give him his title, though at this stage of our prog- 
ress we did not know into what patrician care we 
had fallen), had already told us what the charge for 
-mules would be, but it was necessary to go through 
the ceremony of bargain with the muleteer before 
taking the beasts. Their owner was a Cimbrian, 
with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward 
accent of Italian which at once more marked his 
northern race, and made 'us feel comparatively se- 
cure from plunder in his hands. He had come down 
from the mountain top the night before, bringing 
three mules laden with charcoal, and he had waited 
for us till the morning. His beasts w^ere furnished 
with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride 
upon, and with halters instead of bridles, and we 
were prayed to let them have their heads in the 
ascent, and not to try to guide them. 

The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Ital- 
ian town nearly the whole population is elegantly at 
leisure) turned out to witness the departure of our 
expedition ; the pretty little blonde wife of our inn- 
keeper, who was to get dinner ready against our re- 
turn, held up her baby to wish us boan viaggio, and 
waved us adieu with the infant as with a handker- 
chief; the chickens and children scattered- to right 
and left before our advance ; and with Count Gio- 
vanni going splendidly ahead on foot, and the Cim- 
brian bringing up the rear, we struck on the broad 
rocky valley between the heights, and presently 



A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 239 

began the ascent. It was a lovely morning ; the sun 
was on the heads of the hills, and the shadows 
clothed them like robes to their feet ; and I should 
be glad to feel here and now the sweetness, fresh- 
ness, and purity of the mountain air, that seemed 
to bathe our souls in a childlike delight of life. A 
noisy brook gurgled through the valley ; the birds 
sang from the trees ; the Alps rose, crest on crest, 
around us ; and soft before us, among the bald peaks 
showed the wooded height where the Cimbrian vil- 
lage of Fozza stood, with a white chapel gleaming 
from the heart of the lofty grove. Along the moun- 
tain sides the smoke curled from the lonely huts of 
shepherds, and now and then we came upon one of 
those melancholy refuges which are built in the hills 
for such travelers as are belated in their ways, or 
are overtaken there by storms. 

The road for the most part winds by the brink of 
precipices, — walled in with masonry of small stones, 
where Nature has not shored it up with vast mono- 
liths, — and is paved with limestone. It is, of course, 
merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and 
thrilling to experience, how the mules, vain of the 
safety of their foothold, kept as near the border of 
the precipices as possible. For my own part, I 
abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility in- 
volved by this line of conduct ; let the halter hang 
loose upon his neck, and gave him no aid except such 
slight service as was occasionally to be rendered by 
shutting my eyes and holding my breath. The mule 
af the fairer traveler behind rac was not only ambi- 



240 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

tious of peril like my own, but was envious of my 
beast's captaincy, and continually tried to pass him 
on the outside of the path, to the great dismay of 
the gentle rider ; while half-suppressed wails of ter- 
ror from the second lady in the train gave evidence 
of equal vanity and daring in her mule. Count 
Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian came 
behind, and we had little coherent conversation until 
we stopped under a spreading haw-tree, half-way up 
the mountain, to breathe our adventurous beasts. 

Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the 
ladies sketched the other in her novel attitude of cav- 
alier, I listened to the talk of Count Giovanni and 
the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian's name in Italian was 
Lazzaretti, and in his own tongue Briick, which, pro- 
nouncing less regularly, we made Brick, in compli- 
ment to Ills qualities of good fellowship. His broad, 
honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red beard, 
and a light of dry humor shone upon it : he looked, 
we thought, like a Cornishman, and the contrast be- 
tween him and the viso spiolto, pensieri stretti expres- 
sion of Count Giovanni was curious enough. 

Concerning his people, he knew little ; but the 
Capo-gente of Fozza could tell me every thing. Va- 
rious traditions of their origin were believed among 
them ; Brick himself held to one that they had first 
come from Denmark. As we sat there under the 
spreading haw-tree, Count Giovanni and I made him 
give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some Italian 
phrases, whicli the curious may care to see in cor- 
respondence with English and German. Of course, 
German pronunciation must be given to the words : — 



A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 



241 



English- 

I go, 

Thou goest, 
He goes, 
"We go, 
You go, 
They go, 
I went, 

Thou wentest, 
He went, 
Good day, 
Good night, 
How do you do ? 
How goes it ? 

I, 

Thou, 

He, she, 

We, 

You, 

They, 

The head, 

Breast, 

Face, 

Arm, 

Foot, 

Finger, 

Hand, 

Tree, 

Hat, 

God, 

Heaven, 

Earth, 

Mountain, 

Valley, 

Man, 

Woman, 

Lady, 

Child, 

Brother, 

Father, 



Cimbrian. 

I gehe, 
Du gehst, 
Ar geht, 
Hamish gehen, 
Hamish setender 
Dandern gehnt, 
I bin gegehnt, 
Du bist gegehnt, 
Der iganget, 
Uter tag, 
Uter nast, 
Bie estater ? 
Bie gehts ? 

I, 

Du, 

Di, 

Borandern, 

Ihrt, 

Dandern, 

Da kof, 

Petten, 

Denne, 

Arm, 

Yuss, 

Yinger, 

Hant, 

Pom, 

Hoit, 

Got, 

Debelt, 

Erda, 

Perk, 

Tal, 

Mann, 

Beip, 

Yrau, 

Hint, 

Pruder, 

Yada, 



German 
Ich gehe. 
Du gehst. 
Er geht. 
Wir gehen. 
gehnt, Ihr geht. 
Sie gehen. 
Ich bin gegangen. 
Du bist gegangen. 
Er ist gegangen 
Guten Tag. 
Gute Nacht. 
Wie stent's ? 
Wie geht's ? 
Ich. 
Du. 
Er, sie. 
Wir. 
Ihr. 
Sie. 

Der Kopf. 

Brust (Italian petto^ 
Gesicht. 
Arm. 
Fuss. 
Finger. 
Hand. 
Baum. 
Hut. 
Gott. 
Himmel. 
Erde. 
Berg. 
Thai. 
Mann. 
Weib. 
Frau. 
Kind. 
Bruder. 
Yater. 



16 



242 


ITALIAN 


JOURNEYS 




English. 


Cimbrian. 




German. 


Mother, 


* 
Muter, 




Mutter. 


Sister, 


Sch wester, 




Schwester, 


Stone, 


Stone, 




Stein. 



A general resemblance to German and English 
will have been observed in these fragments of Cim- 
brian, while other words will have been noticed as 
quite foreign to either. 

There .was a poor little house of refreshment be- 
side our spreading haw, and a withered old woman 
came out of it and refreshed us with clear spring 
w r ater, and our guides and friends with some bitter 
berries of the mountain, which they admitted were 
unpleasant to the taste, but declared were very good 
for the blood. When they had sufficiently improved 
their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set 
out with the journey of an hour and a quarter still 
between us and Fozza. 

As we drew near the summit of the mountain our 
road grew more level, and instead of creeping along 
by the brinks of precipices, we began to wind through 
bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by 
lofty heights of rock. 

Though September was bland as June at the foot 
of the mountain, we found its breath harsh and cold 
on these heights ; and we remarked that though 
there were here and there breadths of wheat, the 
land was for the most part in sheep pasturage, and 
the grass looked poor and stinted of summer w T armth. 
We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed to be 
of Italian race, and were of the conventional type 
of shepherds, with regular faces, and two elaborate 



A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 243 

surls trained upon their cheeks, as shepherds are 
always represented in stone over the gates of villas. 
They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. 
Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and 
when w r e had returned their greeting, they cried with 
one voice, — " Ah, lords ! is not this a miserable 
country ? The people are poor and the air is cold. 
It is an unhappy land ! " And so passed on, pro- 
foundly sad ; but we could not help smiling at the 
vehement popular desire to have the region abused. 
We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country. 
If the air was cold, it was also pure. 

We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last 
moment, just before parting with Brick, we learned 
that he had passed a whole year in Venice, where he 
had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in 
the city. He declared frankly that he counted that 
year worth all the other years of his life, and that he 
would never have come back to his native heights 
but that his father had died, and left his mother and 
young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, 
and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly ap- 
pointed him over and above the bargain, with some- 
thing for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he 
presently brought to kiss our hands at the house of 
the Capo-gente. 

The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong 
plain on the crest of the mountain, which declines 
from it on three sides, and on the north rises high 
above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder ac- 
clivities. There are not more than thirty houses in 



244 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

the village, and I do not think it numbers more than 
a hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many. 
Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Com- 
muni, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some 
thousands of people, and lies not far from Vicenza. 
The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their 
village, in spite of its littleness, and they had just 
completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo- 
gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it. 
The church, like all the other edifices, was built of 
stone ; and the village at a little distance might look 
like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with 
the harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadow- 
lands, pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tear- 
ful flower, stretched about the village and southward 
as far as to that wooded point which had all day been 
our landmark in the ascent. 

Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo- 
gente (in Fozza all doors are alike humble), and, 
leaving our mules, we entered by his wife's invita- 
tion, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of 
the kitchen — welcome, though we knew that all the 
sunny Lombard plain below was purple with grapes 
and black with figs. Again came from the women 
here the wail of the shepherds : " Ah, lords ! is it not 
a miserable land ? " and I began to doubt whether 
the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their 
inclement heights was not altogether fabulous. They 
made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before 
us with some unhappy wine, and while we were eat- 
ing, the Capo-gente came in. 



A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 245 

He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of 
course, the bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely 
life at that altitude, where contact with the world 
'must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens seemed to 
regard him. with a kind of affectionate deference, and 
some of them came in to hear him talk with the 
strangers. He stood till we prayed him to sit down, 
and he presently consented to take some wine with 
us. 

After all, however, he could not tell us much 'of 
his people which we had not heard before. A tradi- 
tion existed among them, he said, that their ances- 
tors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that 
they had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and 
caves of the mountains, living and burying their dead 
in the same secret places. At what time they had 
been converted to Christianity he could not tell ; 
they had, up to the beginning of the present century, 
had little or no intercourse with the Italian popula- 
tion by which they were surrounded on all sides. 
Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, 
and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its lan- 
guage. But now intermarriage is very frequent ; 
both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all 
the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling 
into disuse. They still, however, have books of re- 
ligious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until 
very lately the services of their church were per- 
formed in Cimbrian. 

I begged the Capo to show us some of their books, 



246 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

and he brought us two, — - one a catechism for chil- 
dren, entitled " Dar Kloane Catechism vor z' Belose- 
land vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komiinen, 
un vier Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova." The other 
book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was 
not the only one tempted in recent times to visit 
these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the 
relation of discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch 
Columbus, from Vienna, had been before -me, and I 
cduld only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered 
glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in 
these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary 
of their tongue, which, when it w T as printed, he had 
sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to 
give the name of his book, that the curious may 
buy it if they like. It is called " Johann Andreas 
Schweller's Cimbrisches Worterbuch. Joseph Berg- 
man. Vienna, 1855." 

Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that 
in his community they were chiefly hunters, wood- 
cutters, and charcoal-burners, and that they prac- 
ticed their primitive crafts in those gloomier and 
wilder heights we saw to the northward, and de- 
scended to the towns of the plain to make sale of 
their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast skins. In Asi- 
a'go and the larger communities they were farmers 
and tradesmen like the Italians ; and the Capo be- 
lieved that the Cimbri, in all their villages, num- 
bered near ten thousand. He could tell me of no 
particular customs or usages, and believed they did 



A VISIT TO THE CIMBBI. 247 

not differ from the Italians now except in race and 
language.* They are, of course, subject to the Aus- 
trian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians 
are ; and though they are taxed and made to do mili- 
tary service, they are otherwise left to regulate their 
affairs pretty much at their pleasure. 

The Capo ended his discourse with much polite re- 
gret that he had nothing more worthy to tell us ; 
and, as if- to make us amends for having come so far 
to learn so little, he said there was a hermit living 
near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to 
conduct us to the hermitage. It turned out to be 
the white object which we had seen gleaming in the 
wood on the mountain from so great distance below, 
and the wood turned out to be a pleasant beechen 
grove, in which we found the hermit cutting fagots. 

* The English traveler Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, 
I find) visited Asiago in 1817, mentions that the Cimbri have the 
Celtic custom of waking the dead. " If a traveler dies by the 
way, they plant a cross upon the spot, and all who pass by cast a 
stone upon his cairn. Some go in certain seasons in the year to 
high places and woods, where it is supposed they worshiped their 
divinities, but the origin of the custom is forgot amongst them- 
selves. " If a man dies by violence, they lay him out with his hat 
and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a wayfarer, and 
" symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life." A woman 
dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments. 
Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cim- 
bri, and holds that it is " more consonant to all the evidence of 
history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at 
different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians " in the 
district they now inhabit. " The whole space, which in addition 
to the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by 
rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to 
the east, and the Astico to the west." 



248 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

He was warmly dressed in clothes without rent, and 
wore the clerical knee-breeches. He saluted us with 
a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly 
amazed to hear that we had come all the way from 
America to visit him. His hermitage was built upon 
the side of a white-washed chapel to St. Francis, and 
contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in 
which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They 
opened into the chapel, of which the hermit had the 
care, and which he kept neat and clean like himself. 
He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of 
the titular saint, a priest came and said mass in that 
chapel, and it was easy to see that this was the great 
occasion of the old man's life. For forty years, he 
said, he had been devout ; and for twenty-five he 
had dwelt in this place, where the goodness of God 
and the charity of the poor people around had kept 
him from want. Altogether, he was a pleasant 
enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle, 
simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small 
coins of silver to aid him to continue his life of devo- 
tion, and Count Giovanni bestowed some coppers 
with the stately blessing, " Iddio vi benedica, padre 
mio ! " 

So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started 
down the mountain on foot, for no one may ride 
down those steeps. Long before we reached the bot- 
tom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long 
for dead levels during the rest of life. Yet the de- 
scent was picturesque, and in some things even more 
interesting than the ascent had been. We met more 



A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 249 

people : now melancholy shepherds with their flocks ; 
now swine-herds and swine-herdesses with herds of 
wild black pigs of the Italian breed ; now men driv- 
ing asses that brayed and woke long, loud, and most 
musical echoes in the hills ; now whole peasant fam- 
ilies driving cows, horses, and mules to the plains 
below. On the way down, fragments of autobiog- 
raphy began, with the opportunities of conversation, 
to come, from the Count Giovanni, and we learned 
that he was a private soldier at home on that permesso 
which the Austrian Government frequently gives its 
less able-bodied men in times of peace. He had 
been at home some years, and did not expect to be 
again called into the service. He liked much better 
to be in charge of the cave at Oliero than to carry 
the musket, though he confessed that he liked to see 
the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted 
with many places. He had not many ideas, and the 
philosophy of his life chiefly regarded deportment to- 
ward strangers who visited the cave. He held it an 
error in most custodians to show discontent when 
travelers gave them little ; and he said that if he re- 
ceived never so much, he believed it wise not to be- 
tray exultation. " Always be contented, and nothing 
more," said Count Giovanni. 

" It is what you people always promise beforehand," 
I said, " when you bargain with strangers, to do them 
a certain service for what they please ; but after- 
ward they must pay what you please or have trouble. 
I know you will not be content with what I give 
7011." 



250 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

" If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, 
" call me the greatest ass in the world ! " 

And I am bound to say that, for all I could see 
through the mask of his face, he was satisfied with 
what I gave him, though it was not much. 

He had told us casually that he was nephew of a 
nobleman of a certain rich and ancient family in Ven- 
ice, who sent him money while in the army, but this 
made no great impression on me ; and though I 
knew there was enough noble poverty in Italy to 
have given rise to the proverb, Tin conte che non con- 
ta, non conta niente, yet I confess that it was with a 
shock of surprise I heard our guide and servant sa- 
luted by a lounger in Valstagna with " Sior conte, 
servitor suo ! " I looked narrowly at him, but there 
was no ray of feeling or pride visible in his pale, lan- 
guid visage as he responded, " JBuona sera, earo" 

Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who 
had been all day heaping shawls and guide-books upon 
Count Giovanni, demanding menial offices from him, 
and treating him with good-natured slight, felt un- 
comfortable in his presence, and welcomed the ap- 
pearance of our carriage with our driver, who, hav- 
ing started drunk from Bassano in the morning, had 
kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove 
us back wildly over the road, and almost made us 
sigh for the security of mules ambitious of the brinks 
of precipices. 



MINOR TRAVELS. 



PISA. 



I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway- 
traveler, if he is honest, must be a great deal of the 
custodians, the vetturini, and the facchini, whose agree- 
able acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge of 
the population among which he journeys. We do not 
nowadays carry letters recommending us to citizens 
of the different places. If we did, consider the 
calamity we should be to the be-traveled Italian com 
munities we now bless ! No, we buy our through- 
tickets, and we put up at the hotels praised in the 
hand-book, and are very glad of a little conversation 
with any native, however adulterated he be by con- 
tact with the world to which we belong. I do not 
blush to own that I love the whole rascal race which 
ministers to our curiosity and prej^s upon us, and I 
am not ashamed to have spoken so often in thij? book 
of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters 
who opened to me the different gates of that great 
realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt if they can be 
.uuch known to the dwellers in the land, though they 



252 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers ; 
and if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I 
did not more diligently study them when I could. 
The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs ; they are 
all but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself. 
I remember that years ago when I first visited Cam- 
bridge, there was an old man appeared to me in the 
character of Genius of the College Grounds, who 
showed me all the notable things in our city, — 
its treasures of art, its monuments, — and ended 
by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing me 
off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington 
Elm a bit of the sacred wood for a remembrancer. 
Where now is that old man ? He no longer exists 
for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his dwell- 
ing-house. Let me look for a month about the 
College Grounds, and I shall not see him. But some- 
where in the regions of traveler's faery he still lives, 
and he appears instantly to the new-comer ; he has 
an understanding with the dryads, who keep him 
supplied with boughs from the Washington Elm, and 
his wood-house is full of them. 

Among memorable custodians in Italy was one 
whom we saw at Pisa, where we stopped on our way 
from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, 
and spent an hoar in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. 
The beautiful old town, which every one knows from 
the report of travelers, one yet finds possessed of the 
incommunicable charm which keeps it forever novel 
to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad 
Arno, it mirrors in the flood architecture almost as 



pisa. 253 

fair and noble as that glassed in the Canalazzo, 
and its other streets seemed as tranquil as the canals 
of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day 
of our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and 
gave out scarcely a sound under our wheels. It was 
Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet the empty 
and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. 
The palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements 
were clean ; behind those windows we felt that there 
must be a good deal of easy, comfortable life. It is 
said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe 
where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness 
— everywhere pursued by Railways ■ — still lingers, 
and that you find cheap apartments in those well-pre- 
served old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more 
to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of 
the place would alone be to any reasonable sojourner 
a perpetual recompense, and a princely income far 
exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower 
of Famine, with which we chiefly associate the name 
of Pisa, has been long razed to the ground, and built 
piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but you may 
still visit the dead wall which hides from view the 
place where it stood ; and you may thence drive on, 
as we did, to the great Piazza where stands the un- 
rivaledest group of architecture in the world, after 
that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is 
the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and 
beautiful Duomo, there is the noble Baptistery, there 
is the lovely Campo-Santo, and there — somewhere 
lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping out 



254 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger — is the 
much-experienced cicerone who shows you through 
the edifices. Yours is the fourteen-thousandth Amer- 
ican family to which he has had the honor of acting 
as guide, and he makes vou feel an illogical satisfac- 
tion in thus becoming a contribution to statistics. 

We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's cus- 
tody, and we saw the things which 'it was well to see. 
There was mass, or some other ceremony, transacting; 
but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possi- 
ble, and there was not much to weaken the sense 
of proprietorship with which travelers view objects 
of interest. Then we ascended the Leaning Tower, 
skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by 
an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to 
the tower's inclination, but perhaps not receiving a 
full justification of the Campanile's appearance in pict- 
ures, till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk 
and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the 
blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was 
too terrible for endurance, — even the architectural 
beauty of the tower could not save it from being 
monstrous to us, — and we were glad to hurry away 
from it to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the 
Campo Santo. 

Here are the frescos painted five hundred years 
ago to be ruinous and ready against the time of your 
arrival in 186-4, and you feel that you are the first to 
enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade 
who peers through her fingers at the shameful condi- 
tion of deboshed father Noah, and seems to wink one 



pisa. 255 

eye of wicked amusement at you. Turning after- 
ward to any book written about Italy during the 
time specified, you find your impression of exclusive 
possession of the frescos erroneous, and your muse 
naturally despairs, where so many muses have labored 
in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo. Yet it 
is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched 
and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim 
cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem ; and 
those old paintings, made when Art was — if ever — 
a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce 
more effectively than their authors conceived the 
lessons of life and death ; for they are themselves 
becoming part, of the triumphant decay they repre- 
sent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange 
scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase 
come suddenly upon three dead men in their coffins, 
while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace of a dismal 
righteousness, on a hill in the background, it is yet 
more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are 
hardly discernible in their coffins, and the hermits 
are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy bliss. Alas ! 
Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor 
fears and hopes : with dust he wipes out dust, and 
, with decay he blots the image of decay. 

I assure the reader that I made none of these apt 
reflections in the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have writ- 
ten them out this morning in Cambridge because there 
happens to be an east wind blowing. No one could 
have been sad in the company of our cheerful and 
patient cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get 



256 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

his fourteen-thousandth American family away, still 
would not £0 till he had shown us that monument 
to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. 
This is the mighty chain which the Pisans, m their 
old wars with the Genoese, once stretched across the 
mouth of their harbor to prevent the entrance of the 
hostile galleys. The Genoese w T ith no great trouble 
carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward 
till 1860, when Pisa w r as united to the kingdom of 
Italy. Then the trophy was restored to the Pisans, 
and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo 
Santo, an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual 
amity between ancient foes.* It is not a very good 
world, — e pur si muove. 

The Baptistery stands but a step away from the 
Campo Santo, and our guide ushered us into it with 
the air of one who had till now held in reserve his 
great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think 
he waited till we had looked at some comparatively 
trifling sculptures by Nicolo Pisano before he raised 
his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl. 
While w T e stood in some amazement at this, the 
conscious structure of the dome caught the sound 
and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of 
which I could not have dreamed. The man poured 

* I read in Mr. Norton's Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, that he 
saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, " the chains that marked 
the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is of course pos- 
sible that our cicerone may have employed one of those chains for the 
different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would be a thousand 
pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be limited to the com« 
memoration of one fact only. 



pisa. 257 

out in quick succession his musical wails, and then 
ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in 
response. There was a supernatural beauty in these 
harmonies of which I despair of giving any true idea : 
they were of such tender and exalted rapture that we 
might well have thought them the voices of young- 
eyed cherubim, singing as they passed through Para- 
dise over that spot of earth where we stood. They 
seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and 
soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, 
leaving us poor and penitent and humbled. 

We were long silent, and then broke forth with 
cries of admiration of which the marvelous echo 
made eloquence. 

" Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had 
left the building, "hear such music as that? " 

" The papal choir does not equal it," we answered 
with one voice. 

The cicerone was not to be silenced even with 
such a tribute, and he went on : 

" Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu 
Feelmore, the President ? No ? Ah, what a fine 
man ! You saw that he had his heart actually in his 
hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I 
told him of the Baptistery echo, 4 We have the 
finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.' 
I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a 
little, — thus ! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said 
he, c There is no other echo in the world besides 
this. You are right.' I am unique," pursued the 
cicerone, " for making this echo. But," he added 
17 



258 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

with a sigh, " it has been my ruin. The English 
have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I 
have to howl twenty times a day. When our Victor 
Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the 
tower, and the Campo Santo. Says the king, ' Pfui ! " 
— here the cicerone gave that sweeping outward 
motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss 
a trifling subject — " ' make me the echo ! ' I was 
forced," concluded the cicerone with a strong sense 
of injury in his tone, " to howl half an hour without 
ceasing." 



II. 

THE FERRARA ROAD. 

The delight of one of our first journeys over the 
road between Padua and Ferrara was a Roman 
cameriere out of place, who got into the diligence at 
Ponte Lagoscuro. We w T ere six in all : The Eng- 
lishman who thought it particularly Italian to say 
"Si" three times for every assent; the Veneto (as 
the citizen of the province calls himself, the native 
of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm 
near Padua ; the German lady of a sour and dreadful 
countenance ; our two selves, and the Roman came- 
Here. The last was worth all the rest — being a man 
of vast general information acquired in the course of 
service with families of all nations, and agreeably 
communicative. A brisk and lively little man, with 
dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the Emperor 
Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping him- 
self on the teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting 
his eyebrows when he says any thing specially worthy 
of remark. He, also, long after the conclusion of an 
observation, comes back to himself approvingly, with 
" Si ! " " Va bene ! " " JEcco ! " He speaks beauti- 
ful Italian and constantly, and in a little while we 
know that he was born at Ferrara, bred at Venice, 



260 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

and is now a citizen of Rome. " St. Peter's, Signori, 
— have you ever seen it ? — is the first church of the 
world. At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice 
is a lovely city. Ah ! what beauty ! But unique. 
My second country. Si, Signori, la mia seconder 
patria" After a pause, " Va bene." 

We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in 
having so many countries, and that it will be difficult 
to exile so universal a citizen, which he takes as a 
tribute to his worth, smiles and says, " Eeco ! " 

Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him 
the English manner of living. " Wonderfully well 
they eat — the English. Four times a day. With 
rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always ! And 
tea in the evening, with rosbif cold. Mangiano 
sempre. Ma bene, dico." After a pause, " Si ! " " And 
the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the 
proverb : ' Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mangiano 
bei boccoyiV Q On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat 
fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am going to Venice," 
concludes the cameriere. 

He is the politest man in the world, and the most 
attentive to ladies. The German lady has not spoken 
a word, possibly not knowing the language. Our 
good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates 
her weariness with noble elegance and originality. 
" La Signora si trova un poco sagrificata ?" (" The 
lady feels slightly sacrificed ! ") We all smile, and 
the little man very gladly with us. 

"An elegant way of expressing it/' we venture to 
suggest. The Veneto roars and roars again, and we 



THE FERRARA ROAD. 261 

all shriek, none louder than the Roman himself. 
We never can get over that idea of being slightly 
sacrificed, and it lasts us the whole way to Padua ; 
and when the Veneto gets down at his farm-gate, 
lie first " reverences " us, and then says, " I am very 
sorry for you others who must be still more slightly 
sacrificed." 

At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our came- 
riere. He is not so gay, quite, as he was, and I fan- 
cy that he has not found so many bei bocconi on the 
Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine 
temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to 
know, he asks, any American family going to Rome 
and desiring a cameriere ? 

As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and 
I cannot help thinking, with a little heartache, of how 
the Spring came to meet us once as we rode south- 
ward from Venice toward Florence on that road from 
Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time 
in Tuscany, and all through the wide plains of 
Venetia this was the railroad landscape : fields tilled 
and tended as jealously as gardens, and waving in 
wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay 
cut already, and here and there acres of Indian 
corn. The green of the fields was all dashed with 
the bloody red of poppies ; the fig-trees hung full 
of half-grown fruit ; the orchards were garlanded 
with vines, which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, 
but train from tree to tree, leaving them to droop in 
festoons and sway in the wind, with the slender na- 



262 ITALIAN JOUENEYS. 

tive grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter 
under the same roof the family and all the live stock 
of the farm ; thatched cottages thickly dotting the 
fields, send forth to their cultivation the most pictur- 
esque peasants, — men and women, pretty young 
girls in broad hats, and wonderful old brown and 
crooked crones, who seem never to have been 
younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, 
and white, stretch away on either hand, and the con- 
stant files of poplars escort them wherever they go. 
All about, the birds sing, and the butterflies dance. 
The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn 
up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and 
mellow eyes, at the passing train ; the sunburnt lqut 
behind them suspends the application of the goad ; 
unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of the firm- 
minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomo- 
tive seems to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may 
along these plains of Spring. 

At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, 
and having fought the customary battle with the vet- 
turino before arriving at the terms of contract ; having 
submitted to the successive pillage of the man who 
had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied 
on the trunk, and of the man who hovered obligingly 
about the carriage, and desired to drink our health — 
with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of 
wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d'Oro, and set 
forth from the gate of the old city. 

I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom 
e\nd a fine sense of proprietorship in that mode of 



THE FERRARA ROAD. 263 

travel, combined with sufficient speed, which you do 
not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and buona 
mano, I had bought my carriage and horses and dri- 
ver for the journey of forty miles, and I began to 
look round on the landscape with a cumulative feel- 
ing of ownership in every thing I saw. For me, old 
women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and 
spindle, flax as white as their own hair, came to road- 
side doors, or moved back and forth under orchard 
trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the fields to- 
gether, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or 
gay ribbons, or red caps. The white oxen were 
willing to mass themselves in effective groups, as the 
ploughman turned the end of his furrow ; young 
girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to 
springs as we passed; children had larger eyes and 
finer faces and played more about the cottage doors, 
on account of our posting. As for the vine-garland- 
ed trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the end- 
less fertile plain ; the white distance of the road be- 
fore us with its guardian poplars, — I doubt if people 
in a diligence could have got so much of these things 
as we, Certainly they could not have had all to 
themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed 
through gaping villages, taking the street from every 
body, and fading magnificently away upon the road. 



III. 

TRIESTE. 



If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you 
reach Trieste by six o'clock in the morning, and the 
hills rise to meet you as you enter the broad bay 
dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are 
bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that 
the city lies at their feet under a veil of mist, or 
climbs earlier into view along their sides. The pros- 
pect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing feat- 
ures, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with 
their aspect of continual bleakness, you readily believe 
all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind 
called the Bora which sweeps from them through 
Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies 
walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and 
set afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people 
keep in-doors as much as possible. But the Bora, 
though so sudden and so savage, does give warning 
of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this 
characteristic. They station a man on one of the 
mountain tops, and when he feels the first breath of 
the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all 
within hearing to lay hold of something that cannot 
be blown away, and cling to it till the wind falls. 



TRIESTE. 265 

This may happen in three days or in nine, according 
to the popular proverbs. " The spectacle of the sea," 
says DalP Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, 
" while the Bora blows, is sublime, and when it ceases 
the prospect of the surrounding liills is delightful. 
The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them 
with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly 
softened, even in the heart of winter." 

The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good 
with its stateliness and picturesqueness your loss 
through the grimness of its environs. It is in great 
part hew, very clean, and full of the life and move- 
ment of a prosperous port ; but, better than this, so 
far as the mere sight-seer is concerned, it wins a 
novel charm from the many public staircases by 
which you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, 
and which are made of stone, and lightly railed and 
balustraded with iron. 

Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the 
landing of the steamer to the house of friends in the 
suburbs, and there I grew better disposed toward 
the hills, which, as I strolled over them, I found 
dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere trav- 
ersed by perfectly- kept carriage-roads, and easy and 
pleasant foot-paths. It was in the spring-time, and 
the peach-trees and almond-trees hung full of blos- 
soms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing 
the vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweet- 
ened all the grassy borders. The scene did not want 
a human interest, for the peasant girls were going to 
market at that hour, and I met them everywhere, 



266 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurry- 
ing forward with their wares on the backs of donkevs. 
They were as handsome as heart could wish, and 
they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen 
anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Ro- 
man and Neapolitan provinces, — a bright bodice and 
gown, with the head-dress of dazzling white linen, 
square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the 
shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouch- 
ing on the ground in the market-place, and selling 
their wares, with much glitter of eyes, teeth, and ear- 
rings, and a continual babble of bargaining. 

It seemed to me that the average of good looks 
was greater among the women of Trieste than among 
those of Venice, but that the instances of striking 
and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, 
the Italian type, so pure at Venice, is lost or contin- 
ually modified by the mixed character of the popula- 
tion, which perhaps is most noticeable at the Mer- 
chants' Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with 
glass, where are the offices of the great steam naviga- 
tion ' company, the Austrian Lloyds, — which, far 
more than the favor of the Imperial government, has 
contributed to the prosperity of Trieste, — and where 
the traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over 
the news and the prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat 
talks with an eager Italian or a slow, sure English- 
man ; here the hated Austrian button-holes the Ve- 
netian or the Magyar ; here the Jew meets the Gen- 
tile on common ground ; here Christianity encounters 
the hoary superstitions of the East, and makes a good 



TRIESTE. 267 

thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costume? 
are seen here, and all tongues are heard, the native 
Triestines contributing almost as much to the variety 
of the latter as the foreigners. " In regard to lan- 
guage," says Cantu, " though the country is peopled 
by Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into 
the remotest villages where a few years since it was not 
understood. In the city it is the common and famil- 
iar language ; the Slavonians of the North use the 
German for the language of ceremony ; those of the 
South, as well as the Israelites, the Italian ; while the 
Protestants use the German, the Greeks the Hellenic 
and Illyric, the employes of the civil courts the Ital- 
ian or the German, the schools now German and now 
Italian, the bar and the pulpit Italian. Most of the 
inhabitants, indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many 
tri-lingual, without counting French, which is under- 
stood and spoken from infancy. Italian, German, and 
Greek are written, but the Slavonic little, this having 
remained in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But 
it would be idle to distinguish the population accord- 
ing to language, for the son adopts a language differ- 
ent from the father's, and now prefers one language 
and now another ; the women incline to the Italian ; 
but those of the upper class prefer now German, now 
French, now English, as, from one decade to another, 
affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the sa- 
lons ; in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect 
is heard/' 

And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, 
Venetian discontent seems also to have crept in, and 



268 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

I once heard a Triestine declaim against the Imperial 
government quite in the manner of Venice. It struck 
me that this desire for union with Italy, which he 
declared prevalent in Trieste must be of very recent 
growth, since even so late as 1848, Trieste had re- 
fused to join Venice in the expulsion of the Austrians. 
Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from 
the first ; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of 
their piratical cruises in the lagoons ; gave aid and 
comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the 
Carraras, and the Genoese ; revolted from St. Mark 
whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather 
than remain under his sway, gave themselves five 
centuries ago to Austria. 

The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. 
There are remains of an attributive temple of Jupiter 
under the Duomo, and there is near at hand the 
Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of 
Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised 
Pistojese, Ancangeli, who had seen the medals be- 
stowed on the antiquary by Maria Theresa and 
believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum 
founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above 
all, there is the beautiful residence of that ill-starred 
prince, — the Miramare, where the half-crazed Em- 
press of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's re- 
turn from the experiment of paternal government in 
the New World. It would be hard to tell how Art 
has charmed rock and wave at Miramare, until the 
spur of one of those rugged Triestine hills, jutting 
into the sea, has been made the seat of ease and 



TRIESTE. 269 

luxury, but the visitor is aware of the magic as soon 
as he passes the gate of the palace grounds. These 
are in great part perpendicular, and are over clam- 
bered with airy stairways climbing to. pensile arbors. 
Where horizontal, they are diversified with mimic 
seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses for 
people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On 
the point of land furthest from the acclivity stands 
the Castle of Miramare, half at sea, and half adrift 
in the clouds above : — * 

" And fain it would stoop downward 
To the mirrored wave below ; 
And fain it would soar upward 
In the evening's crimson glow." 

I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier 
at the castle's foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while 
the sea beat inward with as languid a pulse. That 
was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of 
at Miramare : now, perchance, she who is one of the 
most unhappy among women looks dow r n distraught 
from those high windows, and finds in the helpless 
sail and impassive wave the images of her baffled 
hope, and that immeasurable sea which gives back 
its mariners neither to love nor sorrow. I think 
though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we 
may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we 
pity the Mexicans to whom her dreams have brought 
so many woes. 

It was the midnight following my visit to Mira- 
mare when the fiacre in which I had quitted my 
friend's house was drawn up by its greatly bewil- 



270 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

dered driver on the quay near the place where the 
steamer for Venice should be lying. There was no 
steamer for Venice to be seen. The driver swore 
a little in the polyglot profanities of his native city, 
and descending from his box, went and questioned 
different lights — blue lights, yellow lights, green 
lights — to be seen at different points. To a light, 
they were ignorant, though eloquent, and to pass the 
time, we drove up and down the quay, and stopped 
at the landings of all the steamers that touch at 
Trieste. It w r as a snug fiacre enough, but I did not 
care to spend the night in it, and I urged the driver 
to further inquiry. A wanderer whom we met, de- 
clared that it was not the night for the Venice 
steamer ; another admitted that it might be ; a third 
conversed with the driver in low 7 tones, and then 
leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and 
before I had, in view of this mysterious proceeding, 
composed a fitting paragraph for the Fatti Diversi of 
the Osservatore Triestino, descriptive of the state in 
which the Guardie di Polizia should find me floating 
in the bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a 
triste evvenimento — the driver pulled up once more, 
and now beside a steamer. It was the steamer for 
Venice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would 
have used had he driven me directly to it without 
blundering. It was breathing heavily, and was just 
about to depart, but even in the hurry of getting on 
board, I could not help noticing that it seemed to 
have grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in 
it. There was not a soul to be seen except the mute 



TRIESTE. 271 

steward who took my satchel, and guiding me below 
into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone. Here 
again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were 
not the narrow quarters of the Venice steamer, nor 
was this lamp, shedding a soft light on cushioned 
seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort of 
illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the 
small silver bell on the long table, and the mute 
steward appeared. 

Was this the steamer for Venice ? 

Sicuro ! 

All that I could do in comment was to sit down ; 
and in the mean time the steamer trembled, groaned, 
choked, cleared its throat, and we were under way. 

" The other passengers have all gone to. bed, I sup- 
pose," I argued acutely, seeing none of them. Never- 
theless, I thought it odd, and it seemed a shrewd 
means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending 
drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state- 
room. 

He replied with a curious smile that I could have 
any of them. Amazed, I yet selected a state-room, 
and while the steward was gone for the sheets and 
pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors 
of all the other state-rooms. They were empty. 

" Am I the only passenger ? " I asked, when he 
returned, with some anxiety. 

" Precisely," he answered. 

I could not proceed and ask if he composed the 
entire crow — it seemed too fearfully probable that 
he did. 



272 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

I now suspected that I had taken passage with 
the Olandese Volante. There was nothing in the 
world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there, 
with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views 
of the situation underwent a total change. I had 
gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient 
Mariner — I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle ! 

Coming to the surface about six o'clock A. M., I 
found a daylight as cheerful as need be upon the 
appointments of the elegant cabin, and upon the good- 
natured face of the steward when he brought me 
the caffe latte, and the buttered toast for my break 
fast. He said " Servitor suo!" in a loud and com- 
fortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of hav- 
ing thought that he was in any way related to the 
Kightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with- 
cold. 

" This is not the regular Venice steamer, I sup- 
pose," I remarked to the steward as he laid my 
breakfast in state upon the long table. 

No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice 
last night, which was not one of the times of the tri- 
weekly departure. This was one of the steamers 
of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it 
was going at present to take on an extraordinary 
freight at 'Venice for Egypt. I had been permitted 
to come on board because my driver said I had a 
return ticket, and would go. 

Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever 
mysterious in the management of the steamer. The 
captain met me with a bow in the gangway ; seamen 



TRIESTE. 273 

were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they 
always are ; the mate was promenading the bridge, 
and taking the rainy weather as it came, with his 
oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of the steamer 
was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpala- 
table, and making vain efforts at expectoration. 

We were in sight of the breakwater outside Mala- 
mocco, and a pilot-boat was making us from the land. 
Even at this point the innumerable fortifications of 
the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we drew 
near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found 
it a nest of fortresses one with another. 

Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not 
spring resplendent from the sea, as I had always read 
she would. She rose slowly and languidly from the 
water, — not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly, 
bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was. 



18 



IT. 

BASSANO. 

I have already told, in recounting the story of our 
visit to the Cirnbri, how full of courtship we found 
the little city of Bassano on the evening of our arrival 
there. Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo 
da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters 
to treat scriptural story as accessory to mere land- 
scape, and who had a peculiar fondness for painting 
Entrances into the Ark, for in these he could indulge 
without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired 
from observation of local customs in his native town. 
This was the theory offered by one who had imbibed 
the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I 
think it reasonable. At least it does not conflict 
with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excel- 
lent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works 
of Jacopo da Ponte, and his four sons, who are here 
to be seen to better advantage than anywhere else. 
As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little 
frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, 
who will not allow people to look at the pictures till 
he has shown them the adjoining cabinet of geological 
specimens. It is in vain that you assure him of your 
indifference to these scientific seccature ; he is deaf, 



BASSANO. 275 

and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. 
He asked us a hundred questions, and understood 
nothing in reply, insomuch that when he came to his 
last inquiry, " Have the Protestants the same God 
as the Catholics ? " we were rather glad that he 
should be obliged to settle the fact for himself. 

Underneath the gallery w T as a school of boys, 
whom as we entered we heard humming over the 
bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather 
from the opening flowers of orthography. When we 
passed out, the master gave these poor busy bees an 
atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth together 
to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, 
lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap 
— exactly like the schoolmaster in " The Deserted 
Village." We made a pretense of asking him our 
w r ay to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by 
accident upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yard, 
beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old 
city wall, " Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the 
playground of the whole city, and it gave us a pleas- 
anter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet con- 
ceived, to think of its entire population playing ball 
there in the spring afternoons. We respected Bas- 
sano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance 
of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great 
numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other 
house bore a tablet announcing ti^at " Here was born," 
or " Here died," some great or good man of whom nq 
one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough ce* 
lebrity in Bassano to supply the world ; but as laurel 



276 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

is a thing that grows anywhere, I covet rather from 
Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions 
of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where 
visible, is seen to be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it 
is clad almost from the ground in glossy ivy, that 
glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoul- 
ders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is 
turned into a lovely promenade bordered by quiet vil- 
las, with rococo shepherds and shepherdesses in mar- 
ble on their gates ; where the wall is built to the 
verge of the high ground on which the city stands, 
there is a swift, descent to the wide valley of the 
Brenta waving in corn and vines and tobacco. 

We went ujf the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, 
to visit the famous cavern already mentioned, out of 
which, from the secret heart of the hill, gushes one 
of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached by 
passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and 
then through a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping- 
stones are laid in the brawling current through a sue- 
cession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. 
From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all gro- 
tesque and fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is 
embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the 
water in the silence and darkness of the endless night. 
At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cav- 
ern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging 
to the centre of the pool your attention is drawn to 
the dome above you, which contracts into a shaft 
rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and 
even unpierced by light. From somewhere in its 



BASSANO. 277 

mysterious ascent, an auroral boy, with a tallow can- 
dle, produces a so-called effect of sunrise, and sheds a 
sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the cav- 
ern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind 
creatures of subterranean waters are to those of waves 
that laugh and dance above ground. But all caverns 
are much alike in their depressing and gloomy influ- 
ences, and since there is so great opportunity to be 
wretched on the surface of the earth, why do people 
visit them ? I do not know that this is more dispirit- 
ing or its stream more Stygian than another. 

The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives 
everywhere in this part of Italy, and near the en- 
trance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the hill 
something like the apsis of a church, which is popu- 
larly believed to have been the hiding-place of Ce- 
cilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives of 
one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino 
family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should 
have employed this as a place of refuge, and it is 
certain that she was not the wife of Ecelino da Ro- 
mano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ece- 
lino il Monaco, his father ; yet since her name is asso- 
ciated with the grot, let us have her story, which is 
curiously illustrative of the life of the best society 
in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the 
only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, 
Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his 
heiress to the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico. 
When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello cast 
about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it 



278 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du 
Camposampiero promised the greatest advantages. 
Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was delighted, 
but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon 
so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his 
brother-in-law and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. 
It had just happened that Balbo's son, Ecelino il 
Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been 
recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but 
light Speronella ; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy 
guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better terms 
than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia 
for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri 
were furious ; but they dissembled their anger till 
the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia's re- 
jected suitor encountering her upon a journey be- 
yond the protection of her husband, violently dis- 
honored his successful rival. The unhappy lady 
returning to Ecelino at Bassano, recounted her 
wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated 
and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes 
of vengeance in due time consummated. Cecilia 
next married a Venetian noble, and being in due 
time divorced, married yet again, and died the 
mother of a large family of children. 

This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was 
an habitue of the caffd in Bassano who could have 
given some of its particulars from personal recollec- 
tion. He was .an old and smoothly shaven gentle- 
man, in a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we 
saw every evening in a corner of the caffe playing 



BASSANO. 279 

solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no one. 
He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and 
silently played solitaire. There is no good reason to 
doubt that he had been doing the same thing every 
evening for six hundred years. 



P033AGKO, CANOVA S BIRTHPLACE. 

It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest 
of Bassano, but we were sorry to leave the place 
because of the excellence of the inn at which we 
tarried. It w r as called "II Mondo," and it had 
every thing in it that heart could wish. Our rooms 
were miracles of neatness and comfort ; they had the 
freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they 
opened into the dining-hall, w T here we were served 
with indescribable salads and risotti. During our 
sojourn we simply enjoyed the house ; when we were 
come away we wondered that so much perfection of 
hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It 
is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that 
you are everywhere introduced in character, that 
you become fictitious and play a part as in a novel. 
To this inn of The World, our driver had brought us 
with a clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee re- 
ceived from us, and when, in response to his haughty 
summons, the cameriere, who had been gossiping 
with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and 
stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth- 
streaming ruddy light, amid the lovely odors of broil- 
ing and roasting, our driver saluted him with, u Re- 



POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE. 281 

ceive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very 
best. They are worthy of any thing." This at once 
put us back several centuries, and we never ceased 
to be lords and ladies of the period of Don Quixote 
as long as we rested in that inn. 

It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left 
" II Mondo," and gayly journeyed toward Treviso, 
intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace of Canova, 
on our way. The road to the latter place passes 
through a beautiful country, that gently undulates 
on either hand till in the distance it rises into pleasant 
hills and green mountain heights. Possagno itself 
lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of 
which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with 
vines and figs and peaches, to a watercourse below. 
The ground on which the village is built, with its 
quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently 
northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand 
of us coming from Bassano, we saw that stately edi- 
fice with which Canova has honored his humble 
birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it 
cannot help being beautiful and imposing, but it 
would be utterly out of place in any other than an 
Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well 
enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan 
civilization still perceptible in Italy. A sense of 
that past was so strong with us as we ascended 
the broad stairway leading up the slope from the 
village to the level on which the temple stands at 
the foot of a mountain, that we might well have 
believed we approached an altar devoted to the elder 



982 



ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 



worship : through the open doorway and between 
the columns of the portico we could see the priests 
moving to and fro, and the voice of their chant- 
ing came out to us like the sound of hymns to some 
of the deities long disowned ; and I remembered 

how Padre L had said to me in Venice, " Our 

blessed saints are only the old gods baptized and 
christened anew." Within as without, the temple 
resembled the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. 
The niches designed by Canova for statues of the 
saints are empty yet ; but there are busts b}^ his own 
hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. 
Among the people was the sculptor's niece, whom 
our guide pointed out to us, and who was evidently 
used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike 
it, and stared back at us amiably enough, being 
a good-natured, plump, comely dark-faced lady of 
perhaps fifty years. 

Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, 
a boy, knew all about him, — how, more especially, 
he had first manifested his wonderful genius by 
modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the 
highway, and how an Inglese happening along in his 
carriage, saw the boy's work and gave him a plate- 
ful of gold napoleons. I dare say this is as near the 
truth as most facts. And is it not better for the his- 
toric Canova to have begun in this way than to have 
poorly picked up the rudiments of his art in the 
workshop of his father, a maker of altar-pieces and 
the like for country churches ? The Canova family 
has intermarried with the Venetian nobility, and will 



POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE. , 283 

not credit those stories of Canova's beginnings whicli 
his townsmen so fondly cherish. I believe they would 
even distrust the butter-lion with which the boy- 
sculptor is said to have adorned the table of the noble 
Falier, and first won his notice. 

Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very 
pretty gallery containing casts of all Canova's works. 
It is an interesting place, where Psyches and Cupids 
flutter, where Venuses present themselves in every 
variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard, 
straight-backed classic chairs, and mourn in the 
society of faithful Storks ; where the Bereft of this 
century surround death-beds in Greek costume appro- 
priate to the scene ; where Muses and Graces sweetly 
pose themselves and insipidly smile, and where the 
Dancers and Passions, though nakeder, are no wick- 
eder than the Saints and Virtues. In all, there are 
a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and 
among the rest the statue named George Washing- 
ton, which was sent to America in 1820, and after- 
wards destroyed by fire in the Capitol. The figure 
is in a sitting posture ; naturally, it is in the dress of 
a Roman general; and if it does not look much like 
George Washington, it does resemble Julius Caesar. 

The custodian of the gallery had been Canova's 
body-servant, and he loved to talk of his master. 
He had so far imbibed the family spirit that he did 
not like to allow that Canova had ever been other 
than rich and grand, and he begged us not to believe 
the idle stories of his first essays in art. He was 
delighted with our interest in the imperial Washing- 



284 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

ton, and our pleasure in the whole gallery, which we 
viewed with the homage due to the man who had 
rescued the world from Swaggering in sculpture. 
When we were satisfied, he . invited us, with his 
mistress's permission, into the house of the Canovas 
adjoining the gallery ; and there we saw many paint- 
ings by the sculptor, — pausing longest in a lovely 
little room decorated after the Pompeian manner with 
scherzi in miniature panels representing the jocose 
classic usualities : Cupids escaping from cages, and 
being sold from them, and playing many pranks and 
games with Nymphs and Graces. 

Then Canova was done, and Possagno was fin- 
ished; and we resumed our way to Treviso, a town 
nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a 
memory and hardly any other consciousness. The 
Duomo, which is perhaps the ugliest duomo in the 
world, contains an " Annunciation," by Titian, one 
of his best paintings ; and in the Monte di Piet& is 
the grand and beautiful " Entombment," by which 
Giorgione is perhaps most worthily remembered. 
The church of San Nicolo is . interesting from its 
quaint and pleasing frescos by the school of Giotto. 
At the railway station an admirable old man sells the 
most delicious white and purple grapes. 



VI. 

COMO. 

My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream 
of summer, — a vision that remains faded the whole 
year round, till the blazing heats of July bring out 
the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted. 
Then I behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst 
noises and fervors and bustle that seem intolerable 
after my first six months in tranquil, cool, mute Ven- 
ice. Looking at the great white Cathedral, with its 
infinite pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and 
gathering the fierce sun upon it, I half expect to see 
the whole mass calcined by the heat, and crumbling, 
statue by statue, finial by finial, arch by arch, into a 
vast heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred 
English tourists blackening here and there upon the 
ruin, and contributing a smell of burnt leather and 
Scotch tweed to the horror of the scene. All round 
Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and to the 
north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with 
tantalizing snows as with a peasant's white linen ker- 
chief. And I am walking out upon that fuming 
plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which the 
bronze horses may melt any minute ; or I am swel- 
tering through the city's noonday streets, in search 



286 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, ot 
what know I? Coming back to our hotel, "Alia 
Bella Venezia," and greeted on entering by the im- 
mense fresco which covers one whole side of the 
court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder 
that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the 
prow of a gondola toward the airy towers and bal- 
loon-like domes that swim above the unattainable la- 
goons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it 
in coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy 
was shut out upon the dusty plains and stony hills. 
Our desire for water became insufferable ; we paid 
our modest bills, and at six o'clock we took the train 
for Como, where we arrived about the hour when 
Don Abbondio, walking down the lonely path with 
his book of devotions in his hand, gave himself to 
the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrioro. I 
counsel the reader to turn to I Promessi Sjiosi, if 
he would know how all the lovely Como country 
looks at that hour. For me, the ride through the 
evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pen- 
siveness provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, 
which exhales the same sweetness on the way to 
Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land, have 
given me an appetite, and I am to dine before woo- 
ing the descriptive Muse. 

After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an 
English architect whom Ave know, and we take a 
boat together for a moonlight row upon the lake, and 
voyage far up the placid water through air that 
bathes our heated senses like dew. How for we have 



como. 287 

left Milan behind ! On the lake lies the moon, but 
the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for 
the time are as substantial to us as the hills them- 
selves. Hints of habitation appear in the twinkling 
lights along the water's edge, and we suspect an ala- 
baster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible 
house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to 
Pauline, — and some one mouths that well-worn fus- 
tian. The rags of sentimentality flutter from every 
crag and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy — like 
the wilted paper collars which vulgar tourists leave 
by our own mountains and streams, to commemorate 
their enjoyment of the landscape. 

The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind 
us ; the hills and shadows gloom around; the lake is 
a sheet of tremulous silver. There is no telling how 
we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied 
hearts we fall asleep in our room there. The steamer 
starts for the head of the lake at eight o'clock in the 
morning, and we go on board at that hour. 

There is some pretense of shelter in the awning 
stretched over the after part of the boat ; but we do 
not feel the need of it in the fresh morning air, and 
we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be 
the very first to enjoy the famous beauty of the 
scenes opening before us. A few sails dot the water, 
and everywhere there are small, canopied row-boats, 
such as we went pleasuring in last night. We reach 
a bend in the lake, and all the roofs and towers of 
the city of Como pass from view, as if they had 
been so much architecture painted on a scene and 



288 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

shifted out of sight at a theatre. But other roofs and 
towers constantly succeed them, not less lovely and 
picturesque than they, with every curve of the many- 
curving lake. We advance over charming expanses 
of water lying between lofty hills ; and as the lake is 
narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river, 
— like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval wild- 
ness of the acclivities that guard our Western stream, 
and the tawniness of its current. Wherever the hills 
do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nest- 
les on the brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or 
else a cottage, if there is room for nothing more. 
Many little towns climb the heights half-way, and 
where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or 
olives, peasants' houses scale them to the crest. 
They grow loftier and loftier as we leave our start- 
ing-place farther behind, and as we draw near Col- 
ico they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So 
cool a breeze has drawn down between them all the 
way that we fancy it to have come from them till we 
stop at Colico, and find that, but for the efforts of 
our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the dark 
below, we should have had no current of air. A 
burning calm is in the atmosphere, and on the broad,, 
flat valley, — out of which a marshy stream oozes 
into the lake, — and on the snow-crowned hills upon 
the left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the 
right, and on the indolent beggars waiting to wel- 
come us, and sunning their goitres at the landing. 

The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken 
in English as descriptive of the local insalubrity. 



como. 289 

The place was once large, but it has fallen away 
much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its 
public places inviting emigrants to America on the 
part of a German steamship company. It was the 
only advertisement of the kind I ever saw in Italy, 
and I judged that the people must be notoriously 
discontented there to make it worth the while of a 
steamship company to tempt from home any of the 
home-keeping Italian race. And yet Colico, though 
undeniably hot, and openly dirty, and tacitly un- 
healthy, had merits, though the dinner we got there 
was not among its virtues. It had an accessible 
country about it ; that is, its woods and fields were 
not impenetrably walled in from the vagabond foot ; 
and after we had dined we went and lay down under 
some greenly waving trees beside a field of corn, and 
heard the plumed and panoplied maize talking to 
itself of its kindred in America. It always has a 
welcome for tourists of our nation wdierever it finds 
us in Italy ; and sometimes its sympathy, expressed 
in a rustling and clashing of its long green blades, or 
in its strong sw r eet perfume, has, as already .hinted, 
made me homesick, though I have been uniformly 
unaffected by potato-patches and tobacco-fields. If 
only the maize could impart to the Italian cooks the 
beautiful mystery of roasting-ears ! Ah ! then indeed 
it might claim a full and perfect fraternization from 
its compatriots abroad. 

From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could 
see, through the twinkling leaves and the twinkling 
atmosphere, the great hills across the lake, taking 

19 



2 JO ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like 
handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, 
and the red and purple ooze of the unwholesome 
river below " burnt like a witch's oils." It was in- 
deed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature 
there ; and I am afraid that we got nothing more 
comfortable from sentiment, when, rising, we wan- 
dered off through the unguarded fields toward a 
ruined tower on a hill. It must have been a relic of 
feudal times, and I could easily believe it had been 
the hold of one of those wicked lords who used 
to rule in the terror of the people beside peaceful 
and happy Como. But the life, good or bad, was 
utterly gone out of it now, and w T hat w r as left of 
the tower was a burden to the sense. A few 
scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew out 
of its fallen stones ; harsh, dust-dry mosses painted 
its weather-worn walls with their blanched gray and 
yellow. From its foot, looking out over the valley, 
we saw the road to the Splu^en Pass lying white-hot 
in the valley ; and while we looked, the diligence ap- 
peared, and dashed through the dust that rose like a 
flame before. After that it was a relief to stroll in 
dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and 
poor stony fields that begrudged them a scanty veg- 
etation, back to the steamer blistering in the sun. 

Xow indeed we were glad of the awning, under 
which a silent crowd of people with sunburnt faces 
waited for the departure of the boat. The breeze 
rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated 
labors, and, with our head toward Como, we pushed 



como. 291 

out into the lake. The company on board was such 
as might be expected. There was a German land- 
scape-painter, with three heart's-friends beside him ; 
there were some German ladies; there were the un- 
failing Americans and the unfailing Englishman ; 
there were some French people ; there were Italians 
from the meridional provinces, dark, thin, and enthu- 
siastic, with fat silent wives, and a rhythmical speech : 
there were Milanese with their families, out for a 
holiday, — round-bodied men, with blunt square feat- 
ures, and hair and vowels clipped surprisingly short , 
there was a young girl whose face was of the exact 
type affected in rococo sculpture, and at whom- one 
gazed without being able to decide whether she was 
a nymph descended from a villa gate, or a saint come 
from under a broken arch in a Renaissance church. 
At one of the little towns two young Englishmen in 
knickerbockers came on board, who were devoured 
by the eyes of their fellow-passengers, and between 
whom and our kindly architect there was instantly 
ratified the tacit treaty of non-intercourse which 
traveling Englishmen observe. 

Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, 
except the gathering coolness of the evening air ; the 
shadows creeping higher and higher on the hills; the 
songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels 
that hummed through the open windows of the fac- 
tories on the shore ; and the appearance of a flag 
that floated from a shallop before the landing of a 
stately villa. The Italians did not know this banner, 
and the Germans loudly debated its nationality. 



292 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

The Englishmen grinned, and the Americans 
blushed in silence. Of all my memories of that hot 
day on Lake Como, this is burnt the deepest ; for the 
flag was that insolent banner which in 1862 pro- 
claimed us a broken people, and persuaded willing 
Europe of our ruin. It has gone down long ago 
from ship and fort and regiment, as w r ell as from the 
shallop on the fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made 
Como too hot for us that afternoon, and even breath- 
less Milan was afterwards a pleasant contrast. 



STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND 
PARMA. 



i. 

It was after sunset when we arrived in the birth- 
place of Palladio, which we found a fair city in the 
lap of caressing hills. There are pretty villas upon 
these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and 
drives about the houses which were pointed out to 
us, by the boy who carried our light luggage from 
the railway station, as the property of rich citizens 
" but little less than lords " in quality. A lovely 
grove lay between the station and the city, and our 
guide not only took us voluntarily by the longest 
route through this, but, after reaching the streets, led 
us by labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he af- 
terwards confessed, to show us the city. He was a 
poet, though in that lowly walk of life, and he had 
done well. No other moment of our stay would 
have served us so well for a first general impression 
of Vicenza as' that twilight hour. In its uncertain 
glimmer we seemed to get quite back to the dawn of 
feudal civilization, when Theodoric founded the great 
Basilica of the city ; and as we stood before the fa- 
mous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight as 
a mast eighty-two metres into the air from a base of 



294 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

seven metres, the wavering obscurity enhanced the 
effect by half concealing the tower's crest, and let- 
ting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Ba- 
silica is greatly restored by Palladio, and the cold 
hand of that friend of virtuous poverty in architect- 
ure lies heavy upon his native city in many places. 
Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architect- 
ure in Vicenza ; and we walked through one street 
of palaces in which Venetian Gothic prevailed, so 
that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had but just 
shrunk away from their bases. When we threw 
open our window at the hotel, we found that it over- 
looked one of the city gates, from which rose a Ghi- 
belline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of the 
beauty and memory of times long before Palladio. 

They were rather troublous times, and not to be 
recalled here in all their circumstance ; but I think it 
due to Vicenza, which is now little spoken of, even 
in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where 
her straw-braid is bought for that of Leghorn, to 
remind the reader that the city was for a long time 
a republic of very independent and warlike stomach. 
Before she arrived at that state, however, she had 
undergone a great variety of fortunes. The Gauls 
founded the city (as I learn from " The Chronicles 
of Vicenza," by Battista Pagliarino, published at Vi- 
cenza in 1563) when Gideon was Judge in Israel, 
and were driven out by the Romans some centuries 
later. As a matter of course, Vicenza was sacked 
by Attila and conquered by Alboin ; after which 
she was ruled by some lords of her own, until she 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 295 

was made an imperial city by Henry I. Then she 
had a government more or less republican in form 
till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and " wrapped 
her in ashes," and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da 
Romano, who " held her in cruel tyranny " from 
1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled her forty 
years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Mi- 
lanese seventeen years ; then she reposed in the 
arms of the Venetian Republic till these fell weak 
and helpless from all the Venetian possessions at the 
threat of Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to 
Venice during the brief Republic of 1848, but the 
most memorable battle of that heroic but unhappy 
epoch gave her back to Austria. Now at last, and 
for the first time, she is Italian. 
Vicenza is 

" Of kindred that have greatly expiated 
And greatly wept," 

and but that I so long fought against Ecelino da Ro- 
mano, and the imperial interest in Italy, I could read- 
ily forgive her all her past errors. To us of the Lom- 
bard League, it was grievous that she should remain 
so doggishly faithful to her tyrant^ though it is to be 
granted that perhaps fear had as much to do with 
her devotion as favor. The defense of 1848 was 
greatly to her honor, and she took an active part jn 
that demonstration against the Austrians which en- 
dured from 1859 till 1866. 

Of the demonstration we travelers saw an amus- 
ing phase at the opera which we attended the evening 
of our arrival in Vicenza. " Nabucodonosor " was the 



ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

piece to be given in the new open-air theatre outside 
the city walls, whither we walked under the starlight. 
It was a pretty structure of fresh white stucco, oval 
in form, with some graceful architectural pretensions 
without, and within verv charminodv ^aliened : while 
overhead it was roofed with a blue dome set with 
such starry mosaic as never covered temple or thea- 
tre since they used to leave their houses of play and 
worship open to the Attic skies. The old Hebrew 
stoiy had, on this stage brought so near to Nature, 
effects seldom known to opera, and the scene evoked 
from far-off days the awful interest of the Bible his- 
tories, — the vague, unfigored oriental splendor — 
the desert — the captive people by the waters of the 
river of Babylon — the shadow and mystery of the 
prophecies. When the Hebrews, chained and toil- 
ing on the banks of the Euphrates, lifted their voices 
in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the 
commonplaceness of the words, that they meant all 
deep and unutterable affliction, and for a while swept 
away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, 
and thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt, 
as but a moment before we had laughed to see 
Nebuchadnezzar's crown shot off his head by a squib 
visibly directed from the side scenes, — at the point 
when, according to the libretto, u the thunder roars, 
and a bolt descends upon the head of the king," — so 
but a moment after some new absurdity marred the 
illusion, and we began to look about the theatre at the 
audience. We then beheld that act of dimostrazione 
which I have mentioned. In one of the few boxes, 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 297 

sat a young and very beautiful woman in a dress of 
white, with a fan which she kept in constant move- 
ment. It was red on one side, and green on the 
other, and gave, with the white dress, the forbidden 
Italian colors, while, looked at alone, it was innocent 
of offense. I do not think a soul in the theatre was 
ignorant of the demonstration. A satisfied conscious- 
ness was reflected from the faces of the Italians, and 
I saw two Austrian officers exchange looks of good-- 
natured intelligence, after a glance at the fair patriot. 
I wonder what those poor people do, now they are 
free, and deprived of the sweet, perilous luxury of 
defying their tyrants by constant acts of subtle dis- 
dain ? Life in Venetia must be very dull : no more 
explosion of pasteboard petards ; no more treason in 
bouquets ; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls 
— it must be insufferably dull. Ebbene, pazienza! 
Perhaps Victor Emanuel may betray them yet. 

A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to 
pervade the whole audience in the theatre that night 
at Vicenza, and to extend to the ministers of the law 
themselves. There were large placards everywhere 
posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to 
smoke in the theatre, and that smokers were liable 
to expulsion ; but except for ourselves, and the fair 
patriot in the box, I think every body there was 
smoking, and the policemen set the example of an- 
archy by smoking the longest and worst cigars of all. 
I am sure that the captive Hebrews all held lighted 
cigarettes behind their backs, and that Nebuchadnez- 
zar, condemned to the grass of the field, conscien- 



298 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

tiously gave himself up to the Virginia ^veed behind 
the scenes. 

Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose 
over the top of the feudal tower, in front of our 
hotel, and produced some very pretty effects with 
the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment 
of Croats marched through the gate below the 
tower, their band playing " The Young Recruit.'' 
These advantages of situation were not charged 
in our bill ; but, even if they had been, I should 
still advise my reader to go, when in Yicenza, if 
he loves a pleasant landlord and a good dinner, to 
the Hotel de la Ville, which he will find almost 
at his sole disposition for however long time he 
may stay. His meals will be served him in a vast 
dining-hall, as bare as a barn or a palace, but for 
the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall, repre- 
senting, as I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, 
Susannah and the Elders, the Roman Lucrezia, and 
other moral and appetizing histories. I take it there 
is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, 
and that an old woodcut picture of the Most Xoble 
City of Venice hangs over each. I know that there 
is a screen at one end of the apartment behind which 
the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter ; and 
I suspect that at the moment of sitting down at 
meat, you hear two Englishmen talking — as they 
pass along the neighboring corridor — of wine, in 
dissatisfied chest-tones. This hotel is of course built 
round a court, in which there is a stable and — ex- 
posed to the weather — a diligence, and two or three 



VTCENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 299 

carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw, 
and a pump and a grape-vine. Why the hotel, there- 
fore, does not smell like a stable, from garret to cellar, 
I am utterly at a loss to know. I state the fact that 
it does not, and that every other hotel in Italy does 
smell of stable as if cattle had been immemorially 
pastured in its halls, and horses housed in its bed- 
chambers, — or as if its only guests were centaurs 
on their travels. 

From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first 
in the morning, and where there are some beautiful 
Montagnas, and an assortment of good and bad works 
by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, 
which is worthy to be seen, if only because of the 
beautiful Laschi monument by Vela, one of the 
greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than 
a very simple tomb, at the door of which stands a 
figure in flowing drapery, with folded hands and up- 
lifted eyes in an attitude exquisitely expressive of 
grief. The figure is said to be the portrait statue of 
the widow of him within the tomb, and the face is 
very beautiful. We asked if the widow was still 
young, and the custodian answered us in terms that 
ought to endear him to all women, if not to our 
whole mortal race, — " Oh quite young, yet. She is 
perhaps fifty years old." 

After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that 
theatre which Palladio built for the representation of 
classic tragedy, and which is perhaps the perfectest 
reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Al- 
fieri is the only poet of modern times, whose works 



300 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

have been judged worthy of this stage, and no drama 
has been given on it since 1857, when the " CEdipus 
Tyrannus " of Sophocles was played. We found it 
very silent and dusty, and were much sadder as we 
walked through its gayly frescoed, desolate ante- 
rooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here 
used to sit, at coffee and bassett, the merry people 
who owned the now empty seats of the theatre, — 
lord, and lady, and abbe, — who affected to be en- 
tertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my 
word, I should like to know what has become, in 
the other world, of those poor pleasurers of the past 
whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes 
of their enjoyment here ! I suppose they have 
something quite as unreal, yonder, to satisfy them 
as they had on earth, and that they still play at 
happiness in the old rococo way, though it is hard 
to conceive of any fiction outside of Italy so per- 
fect and so entirely suited to their unreality as this 
classic theatre. It is a Greek theatre, for Greek 
tragedies ; but it could never have been for popular 
amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it 
had a sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. 
The proscenium is a Greek facade, in three stories, 
such as never was seen in Greece ; and the architect- 
ure of the three streets running back from the prosce- 
nium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all 
the dramas, is — like the statues in the niches and 
on the gallery inclosing the auditorium — Greek in 
the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must have 
been but an operatic chorus that sang in the semi- 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 301 

circular space just below the stage and in front of 
the audience. Admit and forget these small blem 
ishes and aberrations, however, and what a marvel- 
ous thing Palladio's theatre is ! The sky above the 
stage is a wonderful trick, and those three streets 
— one in the centre and serving as entrance for the 
royal persons of the drama, one at the right for the 
nobles, and one at the left for the citizens — present 
unsurpassed effects of illusion. They are not painted, 
but modeled in stucco. In perspective they seem 
each half a mile long, but entering them you find 
that they run back from the proscenium only some 
fifteen feet, the fronts of the houses and the statues 
upon them decreasing in recession with a well-or- 
dered abruptness. The semicircular gallery above 
the auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of mar- 
ble crown its colonnade, or occupy niches between 
the columns. 

ii. 

It was curious to pass, with the impression left by 
this costly and ingenious toy upon our minds, at once 
to the amphitheatre in Verona, which, next to the 
Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us by the 
ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the 
wonder and imagination. Indeed, it makes even a 
stronger appeal to the fancy. We know who built 
the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese 
Arena has the mystery of the Pyramids. Was its 
founder Augustus, or Vitellius, or Antoninus, or 
Maximian, or the Republic of Verona? Nothing is 



302 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

certain but that it was conceived and reared by some 
mighty prince or people, and that it yet remains in 
such perfection that the great shows of two thousand 
years ago might take place in it to-day. It is so sug- 
gestive of the fierce and splendid spectacles of Ro- 
man times that the ring left by a modern circus on 
the arena, and absurdly dwarfed by the vast space 
of the oval, had an impertinence which we hotly re- 
sented, looking down on it from the highest grade of 
the interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the 
middle of an ellipse five hundred feet in length and 
four hundred in breadth, and capable of holding fifty 
thousand spectators. The seats that the multitudes 
pressed of old are perfect yet ; scarce a stone has 
been removed from the interior ; the sedile and the 
prefect might take their places again in the balus- 
traded tribunes above the great entrance at either 
end of the arena, and scarcely see that they were 
changed. Nay, the victims and J;he gladiators might 
return to the cells below the seats of the people, and 
not know they had left them for a day ; the wild 
beasts might leap into the arena from dens as 
secure and strong as when first built. The ruin 
within seems only to begin w^ith the aqueduct, which 
was used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but 
which is now choked with the dust of ages. With- 
out, however, is plain enough the doom which is 
w r ritten against all the work of human hands, and 
which, unknown of the builders, is among the memor- 
able things placed in the corner-stone of every edi- 
fice. Of the outer wall that rose high over the high- 



V1CENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 303 

est seats of the amphitheatre, and encircled it with 
stately corridors, giving it vaster amplitude and 
grace, the earthquake of six centuries ago spared 
only a fragment that now threatens above one of the 
narrow Veronese streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-mak- 
ers, and workers in clangorous metals have made 
shops of the lower corridors of the old arena, and it 
is friends and neighbors with the modern life about 
it, as such things usually are in Italy. Fortunately 
for the stranger, the Piazza Bra flanks it on one 
hand, and across this it has a magnificent approach. 
It is not less happy in being little known to senti- 
ment, and the traveler who visits it by moonlight, 
has a full sense of grandeur and pathos, without any 
of the sheepishness attending homage to that bat- 
tered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many 
emotional people have sighed over, kissing and after- 
wards telling. 

But he who would know the innocent charm of a 
ruin as yet almost wholly uncourted by travel, must 
go to the Roman theatre in Verona. It is not a fa- 
vorite of the hand-books ; and we were decided to 
see it chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides 
an admirable gallery of paintings, there is a most in- 
teresting collection of antiques in bronze and marble 
found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edi- 
fice had been completely buried, and a quarter of 
the town was built over it, as Portici is built over 
Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a Jesuit 
convent. One day, some children, playing in the 
garden of one of the shabby houses, suddenly van- 



304 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

ished from sight. Their mother ran like one mad 
(I am telling the story in the words of the peasant 
who related it to me) to the spot where they had 
last been seen, and fell herself into an opening of the 
earth there. The outcry raised by these unfortu- 
nates brought a number of men to their aid, and in 
digging to get them out, an old marble stairway was 
discovered. This was about twenty-five years ago. 
A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land, 
and he immediately began to make excavations. He 
was a rich man, but considered rather whimsical (if 
my peasant represented the opinion of his neigh- 
bors), and as the excavation ate a great deal of 
money (mangiava molti soldi), his sons discontinued 
the work after his death, and nothing has been done 
for some time, now. The peasant in charge was not 
a person of imaginative mind, though he said the 
theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of 
Augustus) was completed two thousand years before 
Christ. He had a purely conventional admiration of 
the work, which he expressed at regular intervals, 
by stopping short in his course, waving both hands 
over the ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, 
" QnaV opera!" However, as he took us faithfully 
into every part of it, there is no reason to complain 
of him. 

We crossed three or four streets, and entered at 
several different gates, in order to see the uncovered 
parts of the work, which could have been but a small 
proportion of the whole. The excavation has been 
carried down thirty and forty feet below the founda- 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 305 

tions of the modern houses, revealing the stone seats 
of the auditorium, the corridors beneath them, and 
the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as 
in the great Amphitheatre. These works are even 
more stupendous than those of the Amphitheatre, 
for in many cases they are not constructed, but 
hewn out of the living rock, so that in this light 
the theatre is a gigantic sculpture. Below all are 
cut channels to collect and carry off the water of 
the springs in w T hich the rock abounds. The depth 
of one of these channels near the Jesuit convent 
must be fifty feet below the present surface. Only 
in one place does the ancient edifice rise near 
the top of the ground, and there is uncovered the 
arched front of what was once a family-box at the 
theatre, with the owner's name graven upon the 
arch. Many poor little houses have of course been 
demolished to carry on the excavations, and to the 
walls that joined them cling memorials of the simple 
life that once inhabited them. To one of the build- 
ings hung a melancholy fire-place left blackened 
with smoke, and battered with use, but witnessing 
that it had once been the heart of a home. It was 
far more touching than any thing in the elder ruin ; 
and I think nothing could have so vividly expressed 
the difference which, in spite of all the resemblances 
noticeable in Italy, exists between the ancient and 
modern civilization, as that family-box at the theatre 
and this simple fireside. 

I do not now remember what fortunate chance it 
was that discovered to us the house of the Capu- 

20 



306 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

lets, and I incline to believe that we gravitated to- 
ward it by operation of well-known natural principles 
which bring travelers acquainted with improbabili- 
ties wherever they go. We found it a very old and 
time-worn edifice, built round an ample court, and 
Ave knew it, as we had been told we should, by the 
cap carven in stone above the interior of the grand 
portal. The family, anciently one of the principal 
of Verona, has fallen from much of its former great- 
ness. On the occasion of our visit, Juliet, very 
dowdily dressed, looked down from the top of a long, 
dirtv staircase which descended into the court, and 
seemed interested to see us ; while her mother ca- 
ressed with one hand a large yellow mastiff, and 
distracted it from its first impulse to fly upon us poor 
children of sentiment. There was a great deal of 
stable litter, and many empty carts standing about 
in the court ; and if I might hazard the opinion 
formed upon these and other appearances, I should 
say that old Capulet has now gone to keeping a hotel, 
united with the retail liquor business, both in a small 
way. 

Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the 
house of the Capulets, than a wish to see Juliet's 
Tomb, which is visited by all strangers, and is the 
common property of the hand-books. It formerly 
stood in a garden, where, up to the beginning of this 
century, it served, says my " Viaggio in Italia," 
" for the basest uses," — just as the sacred prison of 
Tasso was used for a charcoal bin. We found the 
sarcophagus under a shed in one corner of the gar- 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 307 

den of the Orfanotrofio delle Franceschine, and hW 
to confess to each other that it looked like a horse- 
trough roughly hewn out of stone. The garden, said 
the boy in charge of the moving monument, had been 
the burial-place of the Capulets, and this tomb being 
found in the middle of the garden, was easily recog- 
nized as that of Juliet. Its genuineness, as w T ell as 
its employment in the ruse of the lovers, was proven 
beyond cavil by a slight hollow cut for the head to 
rest in, and a hole at the foot " to breathe through," 
as the boy said. Does not the fact that this relic has 
to be protected from the depredations of travelers, 
who could otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak 
eloquently of a large amount of vulgar and rapacious 
innocence drifting about the world ? 

It is w r ell to see even such idle and foolish curiosi- 
ties, however, in a city like Verona, for the mere go- 
ing to and fro in search of them through her streets 
is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, 
no city has a fairer place than she that sits beside 
the eager Adige, and breathes the keen air of moun- 
tains white with snows in winter, green and purple 
with vineyards in summer, and forever rich with mar- 
ble. Around Verona stretch those gardened plains 
of Lombardy, on which Nature, who dotes on Italy, 
and seems but a step-mother to all transalpine lands, 
has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility. 
Within the city's walls, what store of art and his- 
tory ! Her market-places have been the scenes of a 
thousand tragic or ridiculous dramas ; her quaint 
and narrow streets are ballads and legends full of 



308 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown 
piazzas before her churches are tales that are told of 
municipal and ecclesiastical splendor. Her nobles 
sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust in 
them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; 
her lords lie in perpetual state in the heart of the 
city, in magnificent sepulchres of such grace and op- 
ulence, that, unless a language be invented full of 
lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch 
and finial, flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can 
never be described. Sacred be their rest from pen 
of mine, Verona! Nay, while I would, fain bring the 
whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and 
afraid to touch any thing in it with my poor art: 
either the tawny river, spanned with many beautiful 
bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat and turned 
by the rapid current ; or the thoroughfares with 
their passengers and bright shops and caffes ; or the 
grim old feudal towers ; or the age-embrowned pal- 
aces, eloquent in their haughty strength of the times 
when they were family fortresses ; or the churches 
with the red pillars of their porticos resting upon the 
backs of eagle-headed lions; or even the white-coated 
garrison (now there no more), with its heavy-footed 
rank and file, its handsome and resplendent officers, 
its bristling fortifications, its horses and artillery, 
crowding the piazzas of churches turned into barracks. 
All these things haunt my memory, but I could only 
at best thinly sketch them in meagre black and white. 
Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her archi- 
tecture, and her churches are more worthy to be 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 309 

seen than any others in North Italy, outside of Ven- 
ice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on its 
doors representing in the rudeness of the first period 
of art the incidents of the Old Testament and the 
miracles of the saints — with the allegorical sculptures 
surrounding the interior and exterior of the portico, 
and illustrating, among other things, the creation of 
Eve with absolute literalness — with its beautiful and 
solemn crypt in which the dust of the titular saint 
lies entombed — with its minute windows, and its 
vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of 
every bizarre and fantastic device — is doubtless most 
abundant in that Gothic spirit, now grotesque and 
now earnest, which somewhere appears in all the 
churches of Verona ; which has carven upon the fa- 
cade of the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Ollivi- 
ero, heroes of romance, and near them has placed the 
scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe and cowl, 
with a breviary in his paw ; which has reared the ex- 
quisite monument of Guglielmo da Castelbarco before 
the church of St. Anastasia, and has produced the 
tombs of the Scaligeri before the chapel of Santa 
Maria Antica. 

I have already pledged myself not to attempt any 
description of these tombs, and shall not fall now. 
But I bought in the English tongue, as written at 
Verona, some " Notices," kept for sale by the sacris- 
tan, " of the Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the 
Tombs of the most illustrious Family Della-Scala," 
and from these I think it no dereliction to quote ver- 
batim. First is the tomb of Can Francesco, who was 



310 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

" surnamecl the Great by reason of his valor." 
" With him the Great Alighieri and other exiles took 
refuge. We see his figure extended upon a bed, 
and above his statue on horsebac with the vizoi 
down, and his crest falling behind his shoulders, his 
horse covered with mail. The columns and capitals 
are wonderful." " Within the Cemetery to the 
right leaning against the walls of the church is the 
tomb of John Scaliger." u In the side of this tomb 
near the wall of Sacristy, you see the urn that en- 
closes the ashes of Martin I.," " who was traitor- 
ously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scara- 
mello of the Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the 
honor of a young lady of his family." " The Mau- 
soleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses 
the Martin II. 's ashes. . . . This building is sumpt- 
uous and wonderful because it stands on four col- 
umns, each of which has an architrave of nine feet. 
On the beams stands a very large square of marble 
that forms the floor, on which stands the urn of the 
Defunct. Four other columns support the vault 
that covers the urn ; and the rest is adorned by facts 
of Old Testament. Upon the Summit is the eques- 
trian statue as large as life." Of "Can Signo- 
rius," whose tomb is the most splendid of all, the 
" Notices " say : " He spent two thousand florins of 
gold, in order to prepare his own sepulchre while he 
was yet alive, and to surpass the magnificence of his 
predecessors. The monument is as magnificent as 
the contracted space allows. Six columns support 
the floor of marble on which it stands covered with 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 3U 

figures. Six other columns support the top, on that 
is the Scaliger's statues. . . . The monument is sur- 
rounded by an enclosure of red marble, with six pil- 
lars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. 
The rails of iron with the Arms of the Scala, are 
worked with a beauty wonderful for that age," or, I 
may add, for any age. These " rails " are an exqui- 
site net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art 
emulous of that of Nicolo Caparra at Florence. The 
chief device employed is a ladder Qscala) constantly 
repeated in the centres of quatre-foils ; and the 
whole fabric is still so flexible and perfect, after the 
lapse of centuries, that the net may be shaken 
throughout by a touch. Four other tombs of the 
Scaligeri are here, among which the " Notices " par- 
ticularly mention that of Alboin della Scala : " He 
was one of the Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn 
schew, that is a staircase risen by an eagle — where- 
fore Dante said, In sulla Scala porta il santo 
Uccelb." 

I should have been glad to meet the author of 
these delightful histories, but in his absence we 
fared well enough with the sacristan. When, a few 
hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look 
at the beautiful sepulchres, he recognized us, and see- 
ing a sketch-book in the party, he invited us within 
the inclosure again, and then ran and fetched chairs 
for us to sit upon — nay, even placed chairs for us to 
rest our feet on. Winning and exuberant courtesy 
of the Italian race! If I had never acknowledged 
it before, I must do homage to it now, remembering 



312 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

the sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of 
Verona. They were all men of the most sympa- 
thetic natures. He at San Zenone seemed never to 
have met with real friends till we expressed pleasure 
in the magnificent Mantegna, which is the pride of 
his church. " What coloring ! " he cried, and then 
triumphantly took us into the crypt : " What a mag- 
nificent crypt ! What works they executed in those 
days, there ! " At San Giorgio Maggiore, where 
there are a Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four hor- 
rible swindling big pictures by Romanino, I discov- 
ered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket 
but five soldi, which I offered with much abasement 
and many apologies to the sacristan ; but he received 
them as if they had been so many napoleons, prayed 
me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that 
his labors in our behalf had been nothing but pleas- 
ure. At Santa Maria in Organo, where are the 
wonderful intagli of Fra Giovanni da Verona, the 
sacristan fully snared our sorrow that the best pict- 
ures could not be unveiled as it was Holy Week. 
He was also moved with us at the gradual decay of 
the intagli, and led us to believe that, to a man of so 
much sensibility, the general ruinous state of the 
church was an inexpressible affliction ; and we re- 
joiced for his sake that it should possess at least one 
piece of art in perfect repair. This was a modern 
work, that day exposed for the first time, and it rep- 
resented in a group of wooden figures The Death of 
St. Joseph. The Virgin and Christ supported the 
dying saint on either hand ; and as the whole was 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 313 

vividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow 
gauze descended upon Joseph's head, nothing could 
have been more impressive. 



III. 

Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be 
called characteristic of the great ducal cities of Italy, 
and w r hich it fully shares with Mantua, Ferrara, and 
Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza, 
Padua, and Treviso, are far more picturesque, and 
Parma excels only in the number and beauty of her 
fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect, says Valery, 
who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, 
for its sadness did not impress us. We had just 
come from Modena, where the badness of our hotel 
enveloped the city in an atmosphere of profound 
melancholy. In fact, it will not do to trust to trav- 
elers in any thing. I, for example, have just now 
spoken of the many beautiful fountains in Parma be- 
cause I think it right to uphold the statement of M. 
Richard's hand-book ; but I only remember seeing 
one fountain, passably handsome, there. My Lord 
Corke, who was at Parma in 1754, says nothing of 
fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was 
there a century earlier, merely speaks of the foun- 
tains in the Duke's gardens, which, together with 
his Grace's " wild beasts " and " exquisite coaches," 
and " admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," " the 
Domo, whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand 
s>f Corregio," and the church of the Capuchins, where 



314 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

Alexander Farnese is buried, were " the Chief things 
to be seen in Parma " at that day. 

The wild beasts have long ago run away with the 
exquisite coaches, but the other wonders named by 
Master Lasells are still extant in Parma, together 
with some things he does not name. Our minds, in 
going thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and 
his works, and while our dinner was cooking at the 
admirable Albergo della Posta, we went off to feast 
upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the 
Cathedral. This is one of the finest Gothic churches 
in Italy, and vividly recalls Verona, while it has a 
quite unique and most beautiful feature in the three 
light-columned galleries, that traverse the facade one 
above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Bap- 
tistery, hardly less peculiar and beautiful ; but, after 
all, it is the work of the great painter which gives 
the temple its chief right to wonder and reverence. 
We found the fresco, of course, much wasted, and 
at first glance, before the innumerable arms and 
legs had time to order and attribute themselves 
to their respective bodies, we felt the justice of the 
undying spite which called this divinest of frescos 
a guazzetto di rane. But in another moment it ap- 
peared to us the most sublime conception of the As- 
sumption ever painted, and we did not find Carac- 
ci's praise too warm where he says : u And I still 
remain stupefied with the sight of so grand a work 
— every thing so well conceived — so well seen from 
below — with so much severity, yet with so much 
judgment and so much grace ; with a coloring which 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 315 

is of very flesh." The height of the fresco above 
the floor of the church is so vast that it might well 
appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense 
of the spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were 
strained to utter exhaustion in a very few minutes, 
and we came away with our admiration only half- 
satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, 
and see the fresco on something like equal terms. 
In one sort we did thus approach it, and as we 
looked at the gracious floating figures of the heavenly 
company through the apertures of the dome, they 
did seem to adopt us and make us part of the paint- 
ing. But the tremendous depth, over which they 
drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into ; and I 
am not certain that I should counsel travelers to 
repeat our experience. Where still perfect, the 
fresco can only gain from close inspection, — it is 
painted with such exquisite and jealous perfection, — 
yet the whole effect is now better from below T , for 
the decay is less apparent ; and besides, life is short, 
and the stairway by which one ascends to the dome 
is in every way too exigent. It is w T ith the most 
astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the 
Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous 
roof frescoed by Correggio, in the Monastero di San 
Paolo. You might almost touch the ceiling with your 
hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of vine- 
clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking 
roguishly through the embowering leaves. It is alto- 
gether the loveliest room in the world ; and if the 
Diana in her c?r on the chimney is truly a portrait of 



316 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she 
was altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think 
of her enjoying life in the fashion amiably permit- 
ted to nuns in the fifteenth century. What curious 
scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, 
and what a vivid comment it is upon the age and peo- 
ple that produced it ! This is one of the things that 
makes a single hour of travel worth whole years of 
historic study, and which casts its light upon all fu- 
ture reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little ab- 
bess, with the noblest* and prettiest of her nuns 
about her, received the polite world, and made a 
cheerful thing; of devotion, while all over trans- 
alpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were de- 
stroying pleasant monasteries like this. The light- 
hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen friends looked 
on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason 
to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder 
for them in time, for it made reform within the 
Church as well as without, so that at last the lovely 
Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public 
for more than two centuries. 

All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of 
Titian and Tintoretto, as Naples of Spagnoletto, as 
Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of Palladio, 
as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. 
I have elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclu- 
sively the manner of the masters seems to have 
stamped itself upon the art of the cities where they 
severally wrought, — how at Parma Correggio yet 
lives in all the sketchy mouths of all the pictures 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 317 

painted there since his time. One might almost be- 
lieve, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner 
had infected their dialect, and that they fashioned 
their lazy, incomplete utterance with the careless 
lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost en- 
tirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and 
not with a quick precision, as people do in Venice 
or Milan, but with an ineffable languor, as if lan- 
guage were not worth the effort of enunciation ; 
while they rise and lapse several times in each sen- 
tence, and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the 
closing vocable that the listener can scarcely repress 
his tears. In this melancholy rhythm, one of the citi- 
zens recounted to me the whole story of the assassin- 
ation of the last Duke of Parma in 1850 ; and left 
me as softly moved as if I had been listening to a 
tale of hapless love. Yet it was an ugly story, and 
after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I 
perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was 
done on one of the maddest and wickedest tyrants 
that ever harassed an unhappy city. 

The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napo- 
leon's wife, with pleasant enough feelings, and she 
seems to have been good to them after the manner 
of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beau- 
tifying it in many ways, besides doing works of pri- 
vate charity and beneficence. Her daughter by a 
second marriage, the Countess Sanvitali, still lives in 
Parma ; and in one of the halls of the Academy of 
Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble 
of Canova. It was she who caused the two great 



318 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

pictures of Correggio, the St. Jerome and the Ma- 
donna della Scodella, to be placed alone in separate 
apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's 
initial A is endlessly interwoven. " The Night," to 
which the St. Jerome is c; The Day," is in the gal- 
lery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing 
more representative of her great painter's power 
than this " Day." It is "the bridal of the earth and 
sky," and all sweetness, brightness, and tender 
shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of 
Correggio, ' Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of 
different schools are in this gallery, but it is the good 
fortune of travelers, who have to see so much, that 
the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. 
Nay, in the presence of prime beauty nothing else 
exists, and we found that the church of the Steccata, 
where Parmigianino's sublime " Moses breaking the 
Tables of the Law " is visible in the midst of a mul- 
titude of other figures on the vault, really contained 
nothing at last but that august and awful presence. 

Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities 
in North Italy is that of Parma, which has derived 
all its precious relics from the little city of Valleja 
alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii and the 
wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its 
antique frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think 
nothing better has come out of Herculaneum than 
the comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is 
in bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended 
to us from the elder world; he reels backward, 
and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand 



VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 319 

hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a 
wine-cup — a burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod. 
The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, 
admired by Lasells ; but Lord Corke found it a 
" useless structure " though immense. " The same 
spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, 
" raised the theatre at Parma ; that insatiable spirit 
and lust of Fame which would brave the Almighty 
by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being." 
If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it 
did not build so wisely at Parmn as at Rhodes. The 
play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed in 1628, to 
do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing at Parma 
on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), 
and that for a century afterward was the scene of the 
most brilliant spectacles in the world, is now one of 
the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This Theatrum 
orbis miraculum was built and ornamented with the 
most perishable materials, and even its size has 
shrunken as the imaginations of men have contracted 
under the strong light of later days. When it was 
first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen thousand 
spectators ; at a later fete it held only ten thousand ; 
the last published description fixes its capacity at five 
thousand ; and it is certain that for many and many 
a year it has held only the stray tourists who have 
looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings 
hano- in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is 
thick upon the seats and in the boxes, and on the 
leads that line the space once flooded for naval 
games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and 



320 ITALIAN JOURNEYS, 

forlorn amid the ruin of which they are part ; and 
the great stage, from which the curtain has rotted 
away, yawns dark and empty before the empty au- 
ditorium. 



DUCAL MANTUA. 



In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante 
beholds the Diviners doomed to pace with back- 
ward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the 
rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the 
sweet guide of the Tuscan poet points out among 
the damned the daughter of a Theban king, and 
discourses to his charge : — 

Manto was she: through many lands she went 
Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last. 
Therefore I choose thou be on me intent 

A little. When from life her father passed, 
And they of Bacchus' city became slaves, 
Long time about the world the daughter cast. 

Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves 
The feet of Alps that lock in Germany : 
Benaco called 

And Peschiera in strong harness sits 

To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques, 
Where one down-curving shore the other meets. 

There all the gathered waters outward flow 
That may not in Benaco 's bosom rest, 
And down through pastures green a river go. 



As far as to Governo, where, its quest 

Ended at last, it falls into the Po. 

But far it has not sought before a plain 

It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow 

To be the steaming summer's offense and bane. 
21 



322 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid 
Saw land in the middle of the sullen main, 

Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid 
Of human neighborhood, she made her lair, 
Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade, 

And lived, and left her empty body there. 

Then the sparse people that were scattered near 
Gathered upon that island, everywhere 

Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear. 
They built their city above the witch's grave, 
And for her sake that first made dwelling there 

The name of Mantua to their city gave. 

To this account of the first settlement of Mantua, 
Virgil adds a warning to his charge to distrust all 
other histories of the city's foundation ; and Dante 
is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he de- 
clares all other histories shall be to him as so many 
lifeless embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of 
Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous ; 
and the carefullest and most ruthless of these traces 
the city's origin, not to the unfriendly maid, but to 
the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of 
its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, 
one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine years 
after the creation of the world, three hundred years 
before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years 
after the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. 
" And whoever," says the compiler of the " Flower 
of the Mantuan Chroniclers " (it is a very dry and 
musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities 
for all his facts and figures, — " whoever wishes to 
understand this more curiously, let him read the 
said authors, and he will be satisfied." 

But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's 



DUCAL MANTUA. . 823 

faitli in the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my 
own ; and I therefore uncandidly hold back the 
names of the authorities cited. This tradition was 
in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history 
present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, 
one afternoon of a pleasant Lombard spring ; and 
when I came in sight of the ancient hold of sor- 
cery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying 
sick at its feet, I recognized at least the topo- 
graphical truth of Virgil's description. But old and 
mighty walls now surround the spot which Manto 
found sterile and lonely in the heart of the swamp 
formed by the Mincio, no longer Benaco ; and the 
dust of the witch is multitudinously hidden under 
the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, 
and spires make its approach one of the stateliest in 
the world. It is a prospect on which you may dwell 
long as you draw toward the city, for the road from 
the railway station winds through some two miles of 
flat meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the 
stronghold which the Italians call the first hope of 
the winner of the land, and the last hope of the 
loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of 
the means of access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty 
miles south of Verona, and you are three hours in 
journeying this distance in the placid railway train, 
— a distance which Romeo, returning to Verona 
from his exile in Mantua, no doubt travelled in less 
time. There is abundant leisure to study the scen- 
ery on the way ; but it scarcely repays the perusal, 
for it lacks the beauty of the usual Lombard land- 



324 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

scape. The soil is red, stony, and sterile ; the or- 
chard-trees are scant and slender, and not wedded 
with the caressing vines which elsewhere in North 
Italy garland happier trees and stretch gracefully 
from trunk to trunk. Especially the landscape looks 
sad and shabby about the little village of Villafranca, 
where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed inca- 
pable of a smile even in spring ; as if it had lost all 
hope and cheerfulness since the peace was made 
which confirmed Venetia to the alien. It said as 
plainly as real estate could express the national sen- 
timent, " Come si fa ? Ci vuol pazienza ! " and crept 
sullenly out of sight, as our pensive train resumed its 
meditative progress. No doubt this poor landscape 
was imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a feeling 
that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fer- 
tilize it into a paradise ; as at Venice the gondoliers 
believed that his army would bring in its train cheap 
wine and hordes of rich and helpless Englishmen 
bent on perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without 
understanding as to price. 

But within and without Mantua was a strong ar- 
gument against possibility of change in the political 
condition of this part of Italy. Compassed about 
by the corruption of the swamps and the sluggish 
breadth of the river, the city is no less mighty in 
her artificial defenses than in this natural strength 
of her position ; and the Croats of her garrison were 
as frequent in her sad, handsome streets, as the 
priests in Rome. Three lakes secure her from ap- 
proach upon the east, north, and south ; on the west 



DUCAL MANTUA. 325 

is a vast intrenched camp, which can be flooded at 
pleasure from one of the lakes ; while the water runs 
three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick 
Avails all round the city. There are five gates giv- 
ing access by drawbridges from the town to the for- 
tressed posts on every side, and commanding with 
their guns the roads tha^ lead to them. The outly- 
ing forts, with the citadel, are four in number, and 
are each capable of holding from two to three thou- 
sand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry and 
artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can re- 
ceive a garrison of from thirty to forty thousand 
men ; and the measureless depths of the air are full 
of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and 
serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, 
let him be French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that 
he have an unacclimated enemy before him. 

I confess that little of this formidable military 
knowledge burdened me on the occasion of my visit 
to Mantua, and I have already confessed that I was 
but very imperfectly informed of the history of the 
city. But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with 
himself, how much could he profess to know of Man- 
tuan history ? The ladies all have some erudite 
associations with the place as giving the term of 
mantua-making to the art of dress, and most persons 
have heard that Mantua's law was once death to 
any he that uttered mortal drugs there, and that the 
place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress 
on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works 
in Mantua, a good many have heard ; and there is 



3i!l> ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

something known to the reader of the punctuated 

edition of Browning" about Sordello. But of the 
Gonzagas of Mantua, and their duchy, what do you 
know, gentle reader ? 

For myself , when in Mantua, I tried to make a 

virtue of my want of information, and fancied that 
a sort of general ignorance was more favorable to 
my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough 
acquaintance with the city's history would have 
been. It certainly enabled me to accept all the 
poetic fiction of the custodians, and to embroider 
with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like 
succinctness of the guide-books ; to make out of the 
twilight which involved all impressions a misty and 
heroic picture of the Mantuan past, wherein her 
great men appeared with a stately and gigantic un- 
certainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of 
battle, intrigue, and riot, and were gone before Fact 
could lay her linger on any shape, and swear that it 
was called so, and did so and so. But even if there 
had been neither pleasure nor profit in this igno- 
rance, the means of dispelling it are so scant in mod- 
em literature that it might well have been excused 
in afar more earnest traveller. The difficulty, in- 
deed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to 
learn something of Mantua, is my best excuse for 
writing of its history here. 

I fancy fchat the few recent books on the subject 
are not in the hands of most readers, and I have 
a comforting belief that scarcely a reader of mine 
lias been a render of the "Grande Illustrazione del 



DUCAL MAN I I A. 827 

Lombardo-Veneto." ' Yet 1 suppose that be forms 
some notion of this work from its title, and figures 
to himself a physical bulk of six volumes, large, 
abounding in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the 
appalling features which repel our race from picto- 
rial history-books generally. 

The "Grande lllustrazione <Jol Lombardo-Ve- 
neto" includes notice of all those dear and famous 
cities of North Italy which we know, -of Verona, 
VTicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, 
Bergamo, and the rest ; but here we have only to do 
with the part which concerns Mantua. This is writ- 
ten hy the advocate Bartolomeo Axrighi, whoso in- 
genious avoidance of all that might make his theme 
attractive could not be sufficiently celebrated here, 
and may therefore be left to the reader's fancy. 
There is little in his paper to leaven statistical beavi- 
: and in recounting one of the most picturesque 
histories, he contrives to give merely a list of the 
events and a diagram of the scenes* Whatever 
illustrated character in princes or people he carefully 
excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor 
of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation 
from the elder historiographers. I have therefore 
to go back, in my present purpose, to the authors 
whoso substance he has desiccated ; and with their 
help, and that of one or two antiquated authors 

1 ftfantova e Sua Provlncia, per i' A.wocato Bartolomeo \rrighi: 
Grande llluitrazlont del Lombardo Vtntto s ostia Btoria delle Citta t de\ 
Boryhif Communis Ca telli, eU fino ai Tempi moderni. Per Cura <u 
Ce are Cantu, ed* altrl Literati, Milano, L859. 



328 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

of this century, I shall try to rehabilitate the ducal 
state of Mantua, 

" Which was an image of the mighty world," 

and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. 
The story has the completeness of a tragedy ; but 
it runs over many centuries, and it ends like a farce, 
though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed, al- 
most as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the 
Mantuans themselves, who terminated their national 
existence and parted from their last Duke with 
something like exultation. 

As I recall my own impressions of the city, I 
doubt if any good or bad fortune could rouse her to 
such positive emotion now. She seemed sunken, 
that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding 
lethargy ; as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the 
many-troubled past, — from the renown of all for- 
mer famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and sack, — 
were to be preferred by the ghost of a once popu- 
lous and haughty capital to the most splendid mem- 
ories of national life. Certainly, the phantom of 
bygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle 
tourists who strolled through her wide streets, en- 
joying their quiet beauty and regularity, and find- 
ing them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full 
of something that reminded of home. Coming from 
a land where there is a vast deal of length, breadth, 
and rectitude in streets, as well as human nature, 
they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the 
Mantuan avenues which inspired a Venetian am- 
bassador, two centuries since, to write the Serenest 



DUCAL MANTUA. 329 

Senate in praise of their marvelous extent and 
straightness ; but they were still conscious of a cer- 
tain expansive difference from Gothic Verona and 
narrow Venice. The windows of the ground-floors 
were grated to the prison-like effect common 
throughout Italy ; but people evidently lived upon 
the ground-floors, and at many of the iron-barred 
windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out 
upon the streets, or laughed and chatted together. 
About the open doorways, moreover, people lounged 
gossiping ; and the interiors of the entry-halls, as 
they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, 
and had not that forbidding, inhospitable air char- 
acteristic of most house-entrances in North Italy. 
But sculptured Venice and Verona had unfitted the 
travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua ; and 
they had an immense scorn for the large and beau- 
tiful palaces of which the before-quoted ambassa- 
dor speaks, because they found them faced with 
cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. 
Nevertheless, they could not help a kind of half- 
tender respect for the old town. It shares the do- 
mestic character of its scenes with the other ducal 
cities, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara ; and this char- 
acter is, perhaps, proper to all long and intensely 
municipalized communities. But Mantua has a 
ghostly calm wholly its own ; and this was not in 
the least broken that evening by chatters at thresh- 
olds, and pretty laughers at grated windows. It 
Avas very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of car- 
riages rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met 



330 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

some scattered promenaders. But for the most 
part the streets were quite empty ; and even in the 
chief piazza, where there was still some belated 
show of buying and selling, and about the doors of 
the caffes, where there was a good deal of languid 
loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle. 
There were visibly few people in the place, and it 
was in decay ; but it was not squalid in its lapse. 
The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and 
the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale 
saffron hue wdiich gives such unquestionable respec- 
tability to New England towns. Before we re- 
turned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into 
twilight ; and we walked homeward through a 
placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the 
flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and 
there, by the light of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling 
in a disheartened Mantuan fashion. 

If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow 
pages of those old chronicles of which I spoke, it 
reveals pictures fit to raise both pity and wonder 
for the past of this city, — pictures full of the glory 
of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise 
princes, of the comfort of a prosperous and con- 
tented people, of the grateful fruits of protected 
arts and civilization ; but likewise stained with im- 
ages of unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness 
and cruelty, incredible shame, suffering, and sin. 

Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive 
out the Etruscans from Mantua, and aggrandize 
and beautify the city, to be in their turn expelled 



DUCAL MANTUA. 33] 

by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes 
strong and fair. In this time, the wife of a farmer 
not far from the city dreams a marvelous dream of 
bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time bears 
into the world the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a 
smile upon his face. This is a poet, and they call 
his name Virgil. He goes from his native city to 
Rome, when ripe for glory, and has there the good 
fortune to win back his father's farm, which the 
greedy veterans of Augustus, then settled in the 
Cremonese, had annexed to the spoils bestowed 
upon them by the Emperor. Later in this Roman 
time, and only three years after the death of Him 
whom the poet all but prophesied, another grand 
event marks an epoch in Mantuan history. Ac- 
cording to the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, 
who pierced the side of Christ as he hung upon the 
cross, has been converted by a miracle ; wiping 
away that costly blood from Iris spear-head, and 
then drawing his hand across his eyes, he is sud- 
denly healed of his near-sightedness, and stricken 
with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers 
anxiously the precious drops of blood from his 
weapon into the phial from which the vinegar 
mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life 
of soldier, he wanders with his new-won faith and 
his priceless treasure to Mantua, where it is destined 
to work famous miracles, and to be the most valued 
possession of the city to all after-time. The saint 
himself, preaching the Gospel of Christ, suffers 
martyrdom under Tiberius ; his tongue is cut out, 



832 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

and his body is burnt ; and his ashes are buried at 
Mantua, forgotten, and found again in after ages 
with due signs and miraculous portents. The Ro- 
mans give a civil tranquillity to Mantua : but it is 
not till three centuries after Christ that the perse- 
cutions of the Christian- Then the temples 
of the gods are thrown down, and churches are 
built ; and the city goes forward to share the d 
nies of the Christianized empire, and be spoiled by 
the barbarians. In -407 the Goths take it, and the 
Vandals in their turn sack and waste it. and scatter 
its people, who return again after the storm, and 
rebuild their city. Attila, marching to destroy it, 
is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco 
in the Vatican) by Pope Leo I., who conjures him 
to spare the city, and threatens him with Divine 
vengeance if he refuse ; above the pontiff's head 
two wrathful angels, bearing drawn swords, menace 
the Hun with cleatli if he advance : and. thus mi- 
raculously admonished, he turns aside from Mantua 
and spares it. The citizens successfully resist an 
attack of Alboin ; but the Longobards afterwards, 
imrestrained by the visions of Attila. beat the Man- 
tuans and take the city. From the Lombards the 
Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of Ravenna, 
captured Mantua about the end of the sixth cen- 
tury : and then, the Lombards turning immediately 
to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their prize 
long and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. 
They are allowed to retire with their men and arms 
to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle the city. 



DUCAL MANTUA. 333 

Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule 
there is but little known, except that she went to 
war with the Cremonese ; and it may be fairly sup- 
posed that she was, like her neighbors, completely 
involved in foreign and domestic discords of every 
kind. That war with the Cremonese was about the 
possession of the river Ollio ; and the Mantuans 
came off victors in it, slaying immense numbers of 
the enemy, and taking some thousands of them 
prisoners, whom their countrymen ransomed on con- 
dition of building one of the gates of Mantua with 
materials from the Cremonese territory, and mortar 
mixed with water from the disputed Ollio. The 
reader easily conceives how bitter a pill this must 
have been for the high-toned Cremonese gentlemen 
of that day. 

When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, 
the Mantuan lands and Mantuan men were divided 
up among the brave soldiers who had helped to en- 
slave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne 
became counts ; and the contadini, or inhabitants of 
each contado (county), became absolutely depend- 
ent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to 
the confusion of those who think primitive barbar- 
ism is virtue) that the corruption of those rude and 
brutal old times was great, that all classes were sunk 
in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal and 
abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the 
ninth century, wars broke out all over Italy between 
the factions supporting different aspirants to his 
power; and we may be sure that Mantua had some 



334 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

share in the common quarrel. As I have found no 
explicit record of this period, I distribute to the city, 
as her portion of the calamities, at least two sieges, 
one capture and sack, and a decimation by famine 
and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty years 
later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his 
Hungarians, took it, pillaged it, and put great part 
of its people to the sword. During the siege, some 
pious Mantuans had buried (to save them from the 
religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the 
sponge which had held the gall and vinegar, to- 
gether with the body of St. Longinus. Most un- 
luckily, however, these excellent men were put to 
the sword, and all knowledge of the place of sepul- 
ture perished with them. 

At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, 
by appointment of the Emperor, and the first lord's 
son married the daughter of the Duke of Lorraine, 
' from which union was born the great Countess Ma- 
tilda. Boniface was the happy bridegroom's name, 
and the wedding had a wild splendor and profuse 
barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant enough 
to read of after so much cutting and slashing. The 
viands were passed round on horseback to the guests, 
and the horses were shod with silver shoes looselv 
nailed on, that they might drop off and be scram- 
bled for by the people. Oxen were roasted whole, 
as at a Kentucky barbecue ; and wine was drawn 
from wells with buckets hung on silver chains. It 
was the first great display of that magnificence of 
whic-h after princes of Mantua were so fond : and 



DUCAL MANTUA. 335 

the wretched hinds out of whose sweat it came no 
doubt thought it very fine. 

Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There 
was a plot to depose him discovered in Mantua, and 
the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface demanded 
them ; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs 
was a free city, and no man should be taken from it 
against his will. Boniface marched to attack them ; 
and the Veronese were such fools as to call the 
Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission 
to his government in return for his help. It was 
then that Austria first put her finger into the Italian 
pasticcio, where she kept it so many centuries. But 
the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the 
Veronese made himself intolerable, — ■ the Austrian 
governor always does, — and they drove him out of 
the city. On this the Duke turns about, unites 
with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it. 

An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's 
domination was the miraculous discovery of the 
sacred relics, buried and lost during the sack of 
Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture 
was revealed thrice to a blind pauper in a dream. 
People dug where he bade them and found the rel- 
ics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood 
wrought innumerable miracles ; and the fame of it 
grew so great, that the Pope came to see it, attended 
by such concourse of the people that they were 
obliged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that 
threw the mantle of exterior devotion and laborious 
penances and pilgrimages over the most hideous 



336 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

crimes and unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor 
believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that 
occasion were none the worse for their faith when 
the Pope pronounced the Blood genuine and blessed 
it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm 
they abstained from the violence of war, and paused 
a little in that career of vice and wickedness of 
which one reads in Italian history, with the full 
conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, 
and not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the 
blind beggar believed that Heaven had revealed to 
him the place where the Blood was buried, that the 
Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the 
devout multitudes were helped and uplifted in their 
gross faith by this visible witness to the truth that 
Christ had died for them upon the bloody tree. 
Poor souls ! they had much to contend with in the 
way to any good. The leaven of the old pleasure- 
making pagan civilization was in them yet (it is in 
the Italians to this day) ; and centuries of Northern 
invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without 
teaching them Northern virtues. Nay, I question 
much if their invaders had so many rugged virtues 
to teach as some people would have us think. They 
seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the 
land, and the studied debaucheries of ages of sin, 
and to have enjoyed them as furiously and clumsily 
as bears do the hoarded honey of civilized bees. 

After the death of Boniface the lordship of Man- 
tua fell to his famous daughter, Matilda, of whom 
most have heard. She was a woman of strong will 



DUCAL MANTUA. 337 

and strong mind ; she held her own, and rent from 
others with a mighty hand, till she had united 
nearly all Lombardy under her rule. She was not 
much given to the domestic affections ; she had two 
husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be 
told, divorced them both : one because he wished to 
share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp it; and the 
other because he was not warm enough friend of re- 
ligion. She had no children, and, indeed, in her 
last marriage contract it was expressly provided that 
the spouses were to live in chastity together, and as 
much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. 
She was a great friend to learning, — founded libra- 
ries, established the law schools at Bologna, caused 
the codification of the canon law, corresponded with 
distant nations, and spoke all the different languages 
of her soldiers. More than literature, however, she 
loved the Church ; and fought on the side of Pope 
Gregory VII. in his Avars with the Emperor Henry 
IV. Henry therefore took Mantua from her in 
1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a 
kind of republican government under his protection. 
In that year Henry made peace with Matilda, and 
appointed her his vice-regent in Italy ; but the Man- 
tuans, after twenty years of freedom, were in no hu- 
mor to feel the weight of the mailed hand of this 
strong-minded lady. She was then, moreover, nigh 
to her death ; and, hearing that her physicians had 
given her up, the Mantuans refused submission. 
The great Countess rose irefully from her death- 
bed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as 

22 



838 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

she always did. laid siege to Mantua by land and 
water, entered the city in 1114. and did not die till 
a year after. Such is female resolution. 

The Mantnans now founded a republican govern- 
ment, having unlimited immunities and privileges 
from the Emperor, whose power over them ex- 
tended merely to the investure of their consuls. 
Their republic was democratic, the legislative coun- 
cil of nine rectors and three curators being elective 
by the whole people. This government, or some- 
thing like it, endured for more than a century, dur- 
ing which period the Mantnans seem to have done 
nothing but war with their neighbors in every, di- 
recti on. — with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cre- 
monese a good deal, with the Paduans. with the 
Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the Bolognese ; 
indeed, we count up twelve of these wars. Like 
the English of their time, the Mantnans were 
famous bowmen, and their shafts took flight all 
over Lombardy. At the same time they did not 
omit to fight each other at home ; and it must have 
been a dullish kind of day in Mantua when there 
was no street-battle between families of the factious 
nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the 
Italy of this time, and he might have gone farther 
and fared worse for a type of the infernal state. 
The spectacle of these countless little Italian pow- 
ers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, ag- 
gression, and disorder, within and without, — full of 
intrigue, anguish, and shame. — each with its petty 
chief or victorious faction making war upon the 



DUCAL MANTUA. 339 

other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, per- 
sonal rivalries, and lusts, — is a spectacle which the 
traveller of to-day, passing over the countless for- 
gotten battle-fields, and hurried from one famous 
city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up. 
Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua, 
Vicenza, Verona, Bassano, — all are now at peace 
with each other, and firmly united in the national 
sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten 
alive by Italians. Poor old cities ! it is hard to con- 
ceive of their bygone animosities ; still harder to 
believe that all the villages squatting on the long- 
white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your 
diligence passes, were once embroiled in deadly and 
incessant wars. Municipal pride is a good thing, 
and discentralization is well ; and we have to thank 
these intensely local little states for genius triply 
crowned with the glories of literature, art, and sci- 
ence, which Italy might not have produced if she 
had been united, and if the little states had loved 
themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, 
there is the doubt whether it is not better to bless 
one's obscure and happy children with peace and 
safety, than to give to the world a score of great 
names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery. 
Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the 
Mantuans had troubles on a much larger scale, — 
troubles, indeed, which the Emperor Barbarossa 
laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of 
Frederick the Great you can read a pleasanter ac- 
count of the Emperor's business at Roncaglia about 



340 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

this time than our Italian chroniclers will give you. 
Carlyle loves a tyrant ; and if the tyrant is a ruffian 
and bully, and especially a German, there are hardly 
any lengths to which that historian will not go in 
praise of him. Truly, one would hardly guess, 
from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Ron- 
caglia, with the standard set before his tent, invit- 
ing all men to come and have justice done them, that 
the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for the pur- 
pose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every 
vestige of liberty and independence from miserable 
Italy. Among other cities Mantua lost her free- 
dom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial gov- 
ernor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 
1167, when she joined the famous Lombard League 
against him. The leagued cities beat the Emperor 
at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the 
treaty of Costanza in 1183 ; after which, Freder- 
ick having withdrawn to Germany, they fell to 
fighting among themselves again with redoubled 
zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as 
there had been parties to it. In 1236 the Germans 
again invaded Lornbardy, under Frederick II. ; and 
aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities, Verona, 
Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso, besieged Mantua, 
which surrendered to this formidable union of 
forces, thus becoming once more an imperial city, 
and irreparably fracturing the Lombard League. It 
does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties 
were withdrawn by Frederick II. ; and we read that 
the local wars went on after this with as little in- 



DUCAL MANTUA. 341 

terruptioii as before. The wars went on as usual, 
and on the old terms with Verona and Cremona, 
and there is little in their history to interest us. 
But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua, Ecce- 
lino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of 
Lombardy, gathered his forces and went and sat 
down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused to 
surrender at his summons ; and Eccelino, who had 
very little notion of what the Paduans were doing 
in his absence, swore that he would cut down the 
vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant 
new ones, and drink the wine of their grapes before 
ever he raised the siege. But meantime that con- 
spiracy which ended in Eccelino's ruin had declared 
itself in Padua, and the tyrant was forced to aban- 
don the siege and look to his dominion of other 
cities. 

After which there was something like peace in 
Mantua for twenty years, and the city waxed pros- 
perous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning had 
wholly perished during the wars of the republic, 
and the people built grist-mills on the Mincio, and 
cultivated belles-lettres to some degree. Men of 
heavier science likewise flourished, and we read of 
jurists and astronomers born in those troublous 
days, as well as of a distinguished physician, w1k> 
wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples, and dedi- 
cated it to King Robert of Naples. But by far the 
greatest Mantuan of this time was he of whom 
readers have heard something from a modern poet. 
He is the haughty Lombard soul, " in the move- 



342 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

ment of the eyes honest and slow,*' whom Dante, 
ascending the inexplicable heights of Purgatory, be- 
held ; and who, summoning all himself, leaped to 
the heart of Virgil when he named Mantua : " O 
Mantuan ! I am Sordello, of thine own land ! " 

Of Virgil the superstition of the Middle Ages 
had made a kind of wizard, and of Sordello the old 
writers fable all manner of wonders ; he is both 
knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less 
surprising than those of Aniadis of Gaul. It is 
pretty nearly certain that he was born in 1189 of 
the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan country, and 
that he married Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and 
had amours with the youngest sister of this tyrant, 
the pretty Cunizza, whom Dante places in his " Par- 
adiso." This final disposition of Cunizza, whom we 
should hardly think now of assigning a place among 
the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it 
seems ; for an old commentator defends it, saying : 
" Cunizza was always, it is true, tender and amo- 
rous, and properly called a daughter of Venus ; but 
she was also compassionate, benign, and merciful 
toward those unhappy ones whom her brother cru- 
elly tormented. Therefore the poet is right in 
feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. For if 
the gentle Cyprians deified their Venus, and the 
Romans their Flora, how much more honestly may 
a Christian poet save Cunizza" The lady, whose 
salvation is on these grounds inexpugnably accom- 
plished, was married to Count Sanbonifazio of 
Padua, in her twenty-fourth year ; and Sordello 



DUCAL MANTUA. 348 

was early called to this nobleman's court, having 
already given proofs of his poetic genius. He fell 
in love with Cunizza, whom her lord, becoming the 
enemy of the Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A curi- 
ous glimpse of the maimers and morals of that 
day is afforded by the fact, that the brothers of 
Cunizza conspired to effect her escape with Sordello 
from her husband's court, and that, under the pro- 
tection of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left 
unmolested to their amours. Eccelino, indeed, 
loved this weak sister with extraordinary tender- 
ness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to 
her amorous intrigues by a man who cared nothing 
himself for women. Cunizza lived in one of her 
brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive 
there the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had deter- 
mined to separate them. The poet entered the 
palace by a back door, to reach which he must pass 
through a very filthy alley ; and a servant was sta- 
tioned there to carry Sordello to and fro upon his 
back. One night Eccelino took the servant's place, 
bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return 
carried him back to the mouth of the alley, where 
he revealed himself, to the natural surprise and pain 
of Sordello, who could have reasonably expected 
anything but the mild reproof and warning given 
him by his truculent brother-in-law : " Ora ti basti, 
Sordello. Non venir piu per questa vile strada ad 
opere ancor piu vili." — " Let this suffice thee, Sor- 
dello. Come no more by thi^ vile path to yet viler 
deeds." 



844 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

It was probably after this amour ended that Sor- 
dello sat out upon his travels, visiting most courts, 
and dwelling long in Provence, where he learned to 
poetize in the -Provencal tongue, in which he there- 
after chiefly wrote, and composed many songs. lie 
did not, however, neglect his Lombard language, 
but composed in it a treatise on the art of defending 
towns. The Mantuan historian, Volta, says that 
some of Sordello's Provencal poems exist in manu- 
script in the Vatican and Chigi libraries at Home, 
in the Laurentian at Florence, and the Estense at 
Modena. He was versed in arms as well as letters, 
and he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses 
five miles beyond her walls ; and the republic hav- 
ing lodged sovereign powers in his hands when Ec- 
celino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the de- 
fense with great courage and ability, and did not at 
all betray the place to his obliging brother-in-law, 
as the latter expected. Verci, from whose " His- 
tory of the Eccelini " we have drawn the account 
of Sordello's intrigue with Cunizza, says : " The 
writers represent this Sordello as the most polite, 
the most gentle, the most generous man of his time, 
of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine per- 
son, of lofty bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed 
in letters, and a good poet, as his Provencal poems 
manifest. To these qualities he united military 
valor in such degree that no knight of his time 
could stand before him." He was properly the first 
lord of Mantua, and the republic seems to have died 
with him in 1284. 



DUCAL MANTUA. 345 

The madness which comes npon a people about 
to be enslaved commonly makes them the agents of 
their own undoing. The time had now come for 
the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in, 
Mantua, and the Mantuans, in their assembly of the 
Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into 
the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bona- 
colsi whom Dante mentions in the twentieth canto 
of the " Inferno," had been elected captain of the 
republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from the 
Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the 
right to banish all enemies of the state. This rea- 
sonable demand was granted, and the captain ban- 
ished, as is well known, all enemies of Pinamonte 
Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way, 
he began to favor public tranquillity, abolished 
family feuds and the ancient amusement of street- 
battles, and led his enslaved country in the paths 
of material prosperity ; for which he was no doubt 
lauded in his day by those who thought the Man- 
tuans were not prepared for freedom. He resolved 
to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in 
the Bonacolsi family ; and when he died, in 1293, 
his power descended to his son Bordellone. This 
Bordellone seems to have been a generous and mer- 
ciful captain enough, but he loved ease and pleas- 
ure ; and a rough nephew of his, Guido Botticella, 
conspired against him to that degree that Bordel- 
lone thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to 
abdicate in his favor. Guido had the customary 
war with the Marquis of Ferrara, and then died, 



340 ITALIAN JOUEN1 

and was succeeded by his brother Passerine, a very 
bad person, Whose son at last brought his whole 
family to grief. The Emperor made him vicar of 
Modena ; and he used the Modenese very cruelly, 
and shut up Francesco Pico and his sons in a tower, 
where he starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino. 
In those days. also, the Pope was living at Avignon, 
and people used to send him money and other com- 
forts there out of Italy. An officer of Passerino's, 
being of Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these 
richly laden emissaries, and took his spoils, dividing 
them with Passerino. For this the Pope naturally 
excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and there- 
upon his neighbors made a great deal of pious Avar 
upon him. But he beat the Bolognese, the most 
pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with his 
Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about 
which .Tassomi made his great Bernesque epic, " The 
Rape of the Bucket" (JLa Sepehia Rapitd), and 
which still hangs in the tower of the Duonio at Mo- 
dena. Meantime, while Passerino had done every- 
thing to settle himself comfortably and permanently 
in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless son Fran- 
cesco fell in love with the wife of Filippino Gon- 
zaga. 

According to the old Mantuan chronicles the 
Gonzagas were of a royal German line, and had 
fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770. 
where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at 
once to take part in public affairs. They had now 
grown to be a family of such consequence that they 



DUCAL MANTUA. 847 

could not be offended with impunity, and it was a 
great misfortune to the Bonacolsi that Francesco 
happened to covet Filippino Gonzaga's wife. As 
to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite consequence 
to her eternal health whether she was guilty or no ; 
but to us still on earth, it seems scarcely worth 
while to inquire, after so great lapse of time. His- 
tory, however, rather favors the notion of her inno- 
cence ; and it is said that Francesco, unable to over- 
come her virtue, took away her good fame by evil 
reports. At the same time he was greatly wroth — 
it is scarcely possible to write seriously of these 
ridiculous, wicked old shadows — that this lady's 
husband should have fallen in love with a pretty 
concubine of his, Bonacolsi's ; and, after publicly 
defaming Filippino's wife, he threatened to kill 
him for this passion. The insult and the menace 
sank deep into the bitter hearts of the Gonzagas ; 
and the head of that proud race, Filippino's uncle, 
Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge thf* family dis- 
honor. He was a secret and taciturn man, and a 
pious adulator of his line has praised him for the 
success with which he dissembled his hatred of the 
Bonacolsi, while conspiring to sweep them and their 
dominion away. He won over adherents among 
the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can 
Grande of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bo- 
nacolsi ; and so, one morning, having bribed the 
guards to open the city gates, he- entered Mantua 
at the head of the banded forces. The population 
\vas roused with patriotic cries of " Long live the 



348 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

Mantuan people ! " and, as usual, believed, pool 
souls, that some good was meant them by those 
who came to overthrow their tyrants. The Bona- 
colsi were dreaming that pleasant morning of any- 
thing but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the 
insurrection till it burst out in the great square be- 
fore the Castello di Corte. They then made a fee- 
ble sally from the castle, but were swiftly driven 
back, and Passerino, wounded to death under the 
great Gothic archway of the palace, as he retreated, 
dropped from his languid hands the bridle-rein of 
his charger and the reins of that government with 
which he had so long galled Mantua. The un- 
happy Francesco fled to the cathedral for protec- 
tion ; but the Gonzagas slew him at the foot of the 
altar, with tortures so hideous and incredible, that 
I am glad to have our friend, the advocate Ar- 
righi, deny the fact altogether. Passerino's brother, 
a bishop, was flung into a tower to starve, that the 
Picos might be avenged ; and the city of Mantua 
was liberated. 

In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, 
you gave it up to be pillaged by the army of liber- 
ation ; and Mantua was now sacked by her deliv- 
erers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone 
amounted to a hundred thousand gold florins (about 
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars). The 
Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Pa- 
duans, who, when the Crusaders liberated them 
from Eccelino, grudged these brave fellows three 
days' pillage of their city, and even wished back 



DUCAL MANTUA. 349 

their old tyrant, — the Mantuans, we say, seemed 
not in the least to mind being devoured, but grate- 
fully elected the Gonzaga their captain-general, 
and purchased him absolution from the Pope for 
his crimes committed in the sack. They got this 
absolution for twenty thousand gold florins ; and 
the Pope probably sold it cheap, remembering his 
old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the Gon- 
zaga had overthrown. All this was in the year of 
grace 1328. 

I confess that I am never weary of reading of 
these good, heroic, virtuous old. times in Italy, and 
that I am here tempted to digress into declamation 
about them. There is no study more curious and 
interesting, and I am fond of tracing the two ele- 
ments of character visible in Italian society, and 
every individual Italian, as they flow down from 
the remotest times to these: the one element, 
that capacity for intellectual culture of the highest 
degree ; the other element, that utter untamable- 
ness of passion and feeling. The presence of these 
contradictory elements seems to influence every 
relation of Italian life ; — to make it capable of 
splendor, but barren of comfort ; to endear beauty, 
but not goodness, to the Italian ; to lead him to 
recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice 
them ; to produce a civilization of the mind, and 
not of the soul. 

When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, 
he left his castle beyond Po, to dwell in the city. 
In this castle he had dwelt, like other lords of his 



350 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally, 
and keeping state and open house in an edifice 
strongly built about with walls, encircled with 
ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and guarded 
day and night, from castle moat to castle crest, by 
armed vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his board, 
which was heaped Avith a rude and rich profusion, 
and furnished with carven goblets and plate of gold 
and silver. In fair weather the banquet-hall stood 
open to all the winds that blew ; in foul, the guests 
were sheltered from the storm by curtains of oiled 
linen, and the place was lighted with torches borne 
by splendidly attired pages. The great saloons of 
the castle were decked with tapestries of Flanders 
and Damascus, and the floor was strewn with straw 
or rushes. The bed in which the lord and lady 
slept was the couch of a monarch ; the household 
herded together in the empty chambers, and lay 
upon the floor like swine. The garden-fields about 
the castle smiled with generous harvests ; the peas- 
ant lay down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear 
of invasion from some neighboring state, which 
should rob him of everything, dishonor his wife 
and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking 
ruins of his home. 

In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses 
were built here and there at caprice, without num- 
bers or regularity, and only distinguished by the 
figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted above 
the door. Cattle wandered at will through the 
crooked, narrow, and filthy streets, which rang with 



DUCAL MANTUA. 351 

the clamor of frequent feud, and reeked with the 
blood of the embattled citizens ; over all the squalor 
and wickedness rose the loveliest temples that ever 
blossomed from man's love of the beautiful, to the 
honor and glory of God. 

In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's 
sepulchre from the infidel, while their brothers left 
at home rose against one another, each petty state 
against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine 
and devastation, — wars that slew, or, less merci- 
fully, mutilated prisoners, — that snatched the babe 
from the embrace of its violated mother, and dashed 
out its brains upon the desolated hearth. A hope- 
less, hellish time . of sack, plunder, murder, fam- 
ine, plague, and unnatural crime ; a glorious age, 
in which flourished the gentlest and sweetest poet 
that ever sang, and the grimmest and grandest 
that ever upbraided a godless generation for its 
sins, — in which Petrarch was crowned with laurel 
at Rome, and Dante wandered in despair from 
court to court, learning in the bitterness of his ex- 
ile's heart, 

"come sa di sale 
Lo pane altrui, e come e duro calle 
Lo scendere e il salir per V altrui scale." 

It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but 
debauched with the vices of luxury ; in which cities 
repressed the license of their people by laws regu- 
lating the length of women's gowns and the outlays 
at weddings and funerals. Every wild misdeed and 
filthy crime was committed, and punished by terri- 



352 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

ble penalties, or atoned for by fines. A fierce de- 
mocracy reigned, banishing nobles, razing their pal- 
aces, and ploughing up the salt-sown sites ; till at 
last, in the uttermost paroxysm of madness, it de- 
livered itself up to lords to be defended from itself, 
and was crushed into the abjectest depths of slavery. 
Literature and architecture flourished, and the sis- 
ter arts were born amid the struggles of human na- 
ture convulsed with every abominable passion. 

For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas con- 
tinued to rule the city, which the first prince of 
their line, having well-nigh destroyed, now rebuilt 
and restored to greater splendor than ever ; and it 
is the Mantua of the Gonzagas which travellers of 
this day look upon when they visit the famous old 
city. Their pride and their wealth adorned it ; 
their wisdom and prudence made it rich and pros- 
perous ; their valor glorified it ; their crimes stain 
its annals with infamy ; their wickedness and weak- 
ness ruined it and brought it low. They were a 
race full of hereditary traits of magnificence, but 
one reads their history, and learns to love, of all 
their long succession, only one or two in their 
pride, learns to pity only one or two in their fall. 
They were patriotic, but the patriotism of despotic 
princes is self-love. They were liberal — in spend- 
ing the revenues of the state for the glory of their 
family. They were brave, and led many nameless 
Mantuans to die in forgotten battles for alien quar- 
rels which they never understood. 

The succession of the Gonzagas was of four cap- 



DUCAL MANTUA. 353 

tains, ending in 1407 ; four marquises, ending in 
1484 ; and ten dukes, ending in 1708. 

The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. 
In his time the great Gothic fabric of the Castello 
di Corte was built; and having rebuilt the portions 
of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself, 
as far as might be in that age, to the arts of peace ; 
and it is remembered of him that he tried to cure 
the Mantuan air of its feverish unwholesomeness by 
draining the swampy environs. During his time, 
Petrarch, making a sentimental journey to the 
birthplace of Virgil, was splendidly entertained and 
greatly honored by him. For the rest, Can Grande 
of Verona was by no means content with his hun- 
dred thousand golden florins of spoil from the sack 
of the city, but aspired to its seigniory, declaring 
that he had understood Gonzaga to have promised 
him it as the condition of alliance against the Bo- 
nacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract differ- 
ently, and had so little idea of parting with his 
opinion, that he fought the Scaligero on this point 
of difference till he died, which befell thirty years 
after his election to the captaincy. 

Him his son Guido succeeded, — a prince already 
old at the time of his father's death, and of feeble 
spirit. He shared his dominion with his son Ugo- 
lino, excluding the younger brothers from the do- 
minion. These, indignant at the partiality, one 
night slew their brother Ugolino at a supper he was 
giving ; and being thereupon admitted to a share in 
their father's government, had no trouble in obtain- 

23 



354 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

ing the pardon of the Pope and Emperor. One of 
the murderers died before the father ; the other, 
named Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 
1370, elected to the captaincy, and ruled long, 
wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful life ; and 
though the Emperor confirmed him in the honors 
conferred on him by the Mantuans, and made him 
Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to take part with 
Ghibellines against Guelphs, remained quietly at 
home, and spent himself much in good works, as if 
he would thus expiate his bloody crime. He gath- 
ered artists, poets, and learned men about him, and 
did much to foster all arts. In his time, Mantua 
had rest from war, and grew to have twenty-eight 
thousand inhabitants ; but it was not in the nature 
of a city of the Middle Ages to be long without a 
calamity of some sort, and it is a kind of relief to 
know that Mantua, under this peaceful prince, was 
well-nigh depopulated by a pestilence. 

In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the 
blood-letting began again. Indeed, this captain 
spent nearly his whole life in war with those pleas- 
ant people, the Visconti of Milan. He had mar- 
ried the daughter of Barnabo Visconti, but discov- 
ering her to be unfaithful to him, or believing her 
so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing all 
her family's intercessions for mercy. After that, a 
heavy sadness fell upon him, and he wandered aim- 
lessly about in many Italian cities, and at last mar- 
ried a second time, taking to wife Margherita Mala- 
testa. He was a prince of high and generous soul, 



DUCAL MANTUA. 355 

and of manly greatness rare in his time. There 
came once a creature of the Visconti to him, with a 
plot for secretly taking off his masters ; but the 
Gonzaga (he must have been thought an eccentric 
man by his neighbors) dismissed the wretch with 
scornful horror. I am sure the reader will be glad 
to know that he finally beat the Visconti in fair 
fight, and (the pest still raging in Mantua) lived 
to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When he 
returned, he compiled the city's statutes, divided 
the town into four districts, and named its streets. 
So he died. 

And after this prince had made his end, there 
came another Francesco, or Gianfrancesco, who was 
created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor Sigis- 
mund. He was a friend of war, and having been the 
ward of the Venetian Republic (Venice was fond of 
this kind of trust, and sometimes adopted princely 
persons as her children, among whom the reader 
will of course remember the Queen of Cyprus, and 
the charming Bianca Capello, whose personal attrac- 
tions and singularly skillful knowledge of the use of 
poisons made her Grand Duchess of Tuscany some 
years after she eloped from Venice), he became the 
leader of her armies on the death of Carmagnola, 
who survived the triumphal reception given him 
by the Serenest Senate only a very short time. 1 

1 It seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola. 
suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was recalled 
to Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic. The Sen- 
ate was sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he appeared, and 
they detained him there with various compliments till night fell. Then, 



356 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

The Gonzaga took Verona and Padua for the re- 
public, and met the Milanese in many battles. 
Venice was then fat and insolently profuse with the 
spoils of the Orient, and it is probable that the 
Marquis of Mantua acquired there that taste for 
splendor which he introduced into his hitherto fru- 
gal little state. We read of his being in Venice 
in 1414, when the Jewelers and Goldsmiths' Guild 
gave a tournament in the Piazza San Marco, offering 
as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched 
with pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, 
and two helmets excellently wrought by the gold- 
smiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga, with two 
hundred and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on 
superb horses, contested the prizes with the Marquis 
of Ferrara, at the head of two hundred Ferrarese, 
equally mounted, and attended by their squires and 
pages, magnificently dressed. There were sixty 
thousand spectators of the encounter. " Both the 
Marquises," says Mutinelli in his " Annali Urbani," 
" being each assisted by fourteen well-armed cava- 
liers, combated valorously at the barrier, and were 
both judged worthy of the first prize : a Mantuan 
cavalier took the second." 

The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line 
who began that royal luxury of palaces with which 
Mantua was adorned. He commenced the Ducal 
Palace ; but before he went far with the work, he 

instead of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized Carmagnola. "I am 
a dead man," he exclaimed, on beholding them. And so indeed he 
was; for, three days after, he was led out of prison, and beheaded be- 
tween the pillars of the Piazzetta. 



DUCAL MANTUA. 357 

fell a prey to the science then much affected by 
Italian princes, but still awaiting its last refinement 
from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Mar- 
quis was poisoned by his wife's paramour, and died 
in the year 1444. Against this prince, our advo- 
cate Arrighi records the vandalism of causing to 
be thrown down and broken in pieces the antique 
statue of Virgil, which stood in one of the public 
places of Mantua, and of which the head is still 
shoAvn in the Museum of the city. In all times, the 
Mantuans had honored, in divers ways, their great 
poet, and at certain epochs had coined money bear- 
ing his face. With the common people he had a 
kind of worship (more likely as wizard than as 
poet), and they celebrated annually some now-for- 
gotten event by assembling with songs and dances 
about the statue of Virgil, which was destroyed by 
the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by 
the Marquis's own order. This ill-conditioned per- 
son is supposed to have been " vexed because our 
Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to be 
fellow-citizens of the prince of poets." We can bet- 
ter sympathize with the advocate's indignation at 
this barbarity, than with his blame of Francesco for 
having consented, by his acceptance of the marquis- 
ate, to become a prince of the Roman Empire- 
Mantua was thus subjected to the Emperors, but 
liberty had long been extinguished ; and the volun- 
tary election of the Council, which bestowed the 
captaincy on each succeeding generation of the Gon- 
zagas, was a mere matter of form, and of course. 



358 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an aus- 
tere man, and had been bred in a hard school, if I 
may believe some of our old chroniclers, whom, in 
deed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether 
faithful. It is said that his father loyed his younger 
brother better than him, and that Lodovico ran 
away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his 
father's hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make 
dates agree, it must have been the last of these, for 
the line failed during Lodovico's time, and he had 
wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the day of 
his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and 
with Venice, and the Marquis Gonzaga was at the 
head of the united armies, as we have already seen. 
So the father and son met in several battles ; though 
the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a 
sentiment of piety somewhat amazing in them, con- 
trived that he should never actually encounter his 
parent face to face. Lodovico came home after the 
wars, wearing a long beard ; and his mother called 
her son " the Turk," a nickname that he never lost. 

II Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, 
and he did many works to enrich and beautify the 
city. He established the first printing-office in 
Mantua, where the first book printed was the 
" Decamerone " of Boccaccio. He founded a col- 
lege of advocates, and he dug canals for irrigation ; 
and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers in his 
time may be inferred from the fact that, when the 
King of Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the 
merchants decked their shops with five thousand 
pieces of fine Mantuan cloth. 



DUCAL MANTUA. 359 

The Marquis made his brilliant little court the 
resort of the arts and letters ; and hither from Flor- 
ence came once the elegant Politian, who composed 
his tragedy of " Orfeo " in Mantua, and caused it 
to be first represented before Lodovico. But it 
must be confessed that this was a soil in which art 
flourished better than literature, and that even born 
Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blos- 
somed in other air. The painter Mantegna, whom 
the Marquis invited from Padua, passed his whole 
life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces 
and churches. The prince loved him, and gave him 
a house, and bestowed other honors upon him ; and 
Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous pictures 
representing the Triumph of Julius Caesar. 1 It was 
divided into nine compartments, and, as a frieze, 
went round the upper part of Lodovico's newly 
erected palace of San Sebastian. Mantegna also 
painted a hall in the Castello di Corte, called the 
Stanza di Mantegna, and there, among other sub- 
jects of fable and of war, made the portraits of 
Lodovico and his wife. It was partly the wish to 
see such works of Mantegna as still remained in 
Mantua that took us thither ; and it was chiefly 
this wish that carried us, the morning after our ar- 
rival, to the Castello di Corte, or the Ducal Palace. 
Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no 
degree satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things 
to tempt us to forget Mantegna, and to make us 
more and more interested in the Gonzagas and their 
Mantua. 

1 Now at Hampton Court, in England. 



360 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

It is taken for granted that no Human being ever 
yet gained an idea of any building from the most 
artful description of it ; but if the reader cares to 
fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church 
upon the left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices 
on the right, and an ugly bishop's palace of Renais- 
sance taste behind him, he may figure before him 
as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb 
Gothic front of the Castello di Corte. This facade 
is the only one in Italy that reminds you of the 
most beautiful building in the world, the Ducal Pal- 
ace at Venice ; and it does this merely by right of 
its short pillars and deep Gothic arches in the 
ground story, and the great breadth of wall that 
rises above them, unbroken by the second line of 
columns which relieves and lightens this wall in the 
Venetian palace. It stands at an extremity of the 
city, upon the edge of the broad fresh-water lagoon, 
and is of such extent as to include within its walls 
a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables, play- 
ground, course for riding, and several streets. There 
is a far older edifice adjoining the Castello di Corte, 
which Guido Bonacolsi began, and which witnessed 
the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga sur- 
prised and slew his last successor. But the palace 
itself is all the work of the Gonzagas, and it remains 
the monument of their kingly state and splendid 
pride. 

It was the misfortune of the present writer to be 
recognized by the employe (formerly of Venice) 
who gives the permissions to travellers to visit the 



DUCAL MANTUA. 361 

palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the 
Custode by the dignified title to which his presence 
did so little honor. This circumstance threw upon 
the Custode, a naturally tedious and oppressive old 
man, the responsibility of being doubly, prolix and 
garrulous. He reveled in his office of showing the 
palace, and did homage to the visitor's charge and 
nation by an infinite expansion upon all possible 
points of interest, lest he should go away imper- 
fectly informed of anything. By dint of frequent 
encounter with strangers, this Custode had picked 
up many shreds and fragments of many languages, 
and did not permit the travellers to consider them- 
selves as having at all understood him until he had 
repeated everything in Italian, English, French, 
and German. He led the way with his polyglot 
babble through an endless number of those magnifi- 
cent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem 
specially built to contain, that men may be con- 
tent to dwell in the humbler dullness of their own 
houses ; and though the travellers often prayed 
him to show them the apartments containing the 
works of Mantegna, they really got to see nothing 
of this painter's in the Ducal Palace, except, here 
and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Cus- 
tode would not go beyond a si erede in attributing 
to him. Indeed, it is known that the works of Man- 
tegna suffered grievously in the wars of the last 
century, and his memory has faded so dim in this 
palace where he wrought, that the guide could not 
understand the curiosity of the foreigners concern- 



362 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

ing the old painter ; and certainly Giulio Romano 
has stamped himself more ineffaceably than Man- 
tegna upon Mantua. 

In the Ducal Palace are seen vividly contrasted 
the fineness and strength, the delicacy and courage 
of the fancy, which, rather than the higher gift of 
imagination, characterize Giulio's work. There is 
such an airy refinement and subtile grace in the 
pretty grotesques with which he decorates a cham- 
ber ; there is such daring luxury of color and design 
in the pictures for which his grand halls are merely 
the frames. No doubt I could make fine speeches 
about these paintings ; but who, not seeing them, 
would be the wiser, after the best description and 
the choicest critical disquisition ? In fact, our travel- 
lers themselves found it pleasanter, after a while, to 
yield to the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy 
the stupider marvels of the place, than to do the set 
and difficult admiration of the works of art. So, 
passing the apartments in good preservation (the 
Austrian Emperors had taken good care of some 
parts of the palace of one of their first Italian pos- 
sessions), they did justice to the splendor of the 
satin beds and the other upholstery work ; they 
admired rich carpentering and costly toys ; they 
dwelt on marvelous tapestries (among which the 
tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at 
Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly 
worthy of wonder) ; and they expressed the proper 
amazement at the miracles of art which caused fig- 
ures frescoed in the ceilings to turn with them, and 



DUCAL MANTUA. 363 

follow and face them from whatever part of the 
room they chose to look. Nay, they even enjoyed 
the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the 
usual river-gods were painted, in the company of 
the usual pottery, from which they pour their founts, 
and at the end of which there was an abominable 
little grotto of what people call, in modern land- 
scape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with 
which its unmeaning ugliness fills them. There 
were busts of several Mantuan duchesses in the 
gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures 
were so bad as to molest no one. There was, be- 
sides all this, a hanging garden in this small Baby- 
lon, on which the travellers looked with a doleful 
regret that they were no longer of the age when a 
hanging garden would have brought supreme com- 
fort to the soul. It occupied a spacious oblong, had 
a fountain and statues, trees and flowers, and would 
certainly have been taken for the surface of the 
earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out 
that it was on a level with the second floor, on which 
they stood. 

After that they wandered through a series of un- 
used, dismantled apartments and halls, melancholy 
with faded fresco, dropping stucco, and mutilated 
statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony 
overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early 
dukes built after a design by the inevitable Giulio 
Romano. It is a large square, and was meant for the 
diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all 
round it between those thick columns, finely twisted, 



364 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

as we see them in that cartoon of Raphael, " The 
Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of 
the Temple" ; and here once stood the jolly dukes 
and the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and 
there below rode the gay, insolent, intriguing court- 
iers, and outside groaned the city under the heavy 
extortions of the tax-gatherers. It is all in weather- 
worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted 
with trees. The turf was now cut and carved by the 
heavy wheels of the Austrian baggage-wagons con- 
stantly passing through the court to carry munitions 
to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly over- 
look the dead lagoon. A sense of desolation had 
crept over the sight-seers, with that strange sickness 
of heart which one feels in the presence of ruin not 
to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain 
as the Custode clapped his hands and the echo buf- 
feted itself against the forlorn stucco, and up from 
the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls, and 
flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melan- 
choly cries. It only needed, to crush these poor 
strangers, that final touch which the Custode gave, 
as they passed from the palace through the hall in 
which are painted the Gonzagas, and in which he 
pointed out the last Duke of Mantua, saying he was 
deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow 
conveying the idea of horse-stealing and counter- 
feiting on the part of his Grace. 

A very different man from this rogue was our old 
friend Lodovico, who also, however, had his troubles. 
He was an enemy of the Ghibellines, and fought 



DUCAL MANTUA. 365 

them a great deal. Of course he had the habitual 
wars with Milan, and he was obliged to do battle 
with his own brother Carlo to some extent. This 
Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza; and 
Lodovico, having paid for him a ransom of sixty 
thousand florins of gold (which Carlo was scarcely 
worth), seized the fraternal lands, and held them in 
pledge of repayment. Carlo could not pay, and 
tried to get back his possessions by war. Vexed 
with these and other contentions, Lodovico was also 
unhappy in his son, whose romance I may best tell 
in the words of the history, 1 from which I take it : 

" Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of 
Bavaria to take his daughter Margherita as wife for his 
(Lodovico's) first-born, Federico, and the young man 
having refused her, Lodovico was so much enraged that he 
sought to imprison him ; but the Marchioness Barbara, 
mother of Federico, caused him to fly from the city till his 
father's anger should be abated. Federico departed with 
six attendants; 2 but this flight caused still greater dis- 
pleasure to his father, who now declared him banished, and 
threatened with heavy penalties any one who should give 
him help or favor. Federico, therefore, wandered about 
with these six attendants in divers places, and finally ar- 
rived in Naples ; but having already spent all his sub- 
stance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of 
his father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sick- 
ness. His companions having nothing wherewith to live, 
and not knowing any trade by which to gain their bread, 

1 Volta : Storia di Mantova. 

2 The Fioretto delle Cronache says " persons of gentle condition." 



366 ITALIC JOURNEYS. 

did menial services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their 
lord with their earnings, he remaining hidden in a pooi 
woman's house where they all dwelt. 

" The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers 
provinces with money to find her son, but they never heard 
any news of him ; so that they thought him dead, not hear- 
ing anything, either, of his attendants. Now it happened 
that one of those who sought Federico came to Naples, 
and presented himself to the king with a letter from the 
said lady, praying that he should make search in his ter- 
ritory for a company of seven men, giving the name and 
description of each. The king caused this search to be 
made by the heads of the district ; and one of these heads 
told how in his district there were six Lombard men (not 
knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were labor- 
ers and of base condition. The king determined to see 
them ; and they being come before him, he demanded who 
they were, and how many ; as they were not willing to 
discover their lord, on being asked their names they gave 
others, so that the king, not being able to learn anything, 
would have dismissed them. But the messenger sent by 
the Marchioness knew them, and said to the king, ' Sire, 
these are the attendants of him whom I seek ; but they 
have changed their names.' The king caused them to be 
separated one from another, and then asked them of their 
lord ; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely 
narrated everything ; and the king immediately sent for 
Federico, whom his officers found miserably ill on a heap 
of straw. He was brought to the palace, where the king 
ordered him to be cared for, sending the messenger back 
to his mother to advise her how the men had been found 
and in what great misery. The Marchioness went to her 
husband, and, having cast herself at his feet, besought him 



DUCAL MANTUA. 367 

of a grace. The Marquis answered that he would grant 
everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then the 
lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which 
had such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, 
showing him in how great misery his son had been ; and 
so, giving the letter to the Marchioness, he said, ' Do that 
which pleases you.' The Marchioness straightway sent 
the prince money, and clothes to clothe him, in order that 
he should return to Mantua; and having come, the son 
cast himself at his father's feet, imploring pardon for him- 
self and for his attendants ; and he pardoned them, and 
gave those attendants enough to live honorably and like 
noblemen, and they were called The Faithful of the House 
of Gonzaga, and from them come the Fedeli of Mantua. 
" The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico 
to take Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for 
his wife, and celebrated the nuptials splendidly ; so that 
there remained the greatest love between father and son." 

The son succeeded to the father's dominion in 
1478 ; and it is recorded of him in the " Flower of 
the Chronicles," that he was a hater of idleness, and 
a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They 
chiefly objected to him that he placed a Jew, Euse- 
bio Malatesta, at the head of civil affairs ; and this 
Jew was indeed the cause of great mischief : for 
Bidolfo Gonzaga coming to reside with his -wife for 
a time at the court of his brother, the Marquis, 
Malatesta fell in love with her. She repelled him ; 
and the bitter Jew thereupon so poisoned her hus- 
band's mind with accusations against her chastity, 
that he took her home to his town of Lazzaro, and 



368 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

there put the unhappy and innocent lady to death 
by the headsman's hand in the great square of the 
city. 

Federieo was Marquis only six years, and died in 
1484, leaving his marquisate to his son Francesco, 
the most ambitious, warlike, restless, splendid prince 
of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a beard, 
and brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. 
He founded the famous breed of Mantuan horses, 
and gave them about free-handedly to other sover- 
eigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he 
presented a steed which, if we may trust history, 
could have been sold for almost its weight in goLi. 
He was so fond of hunting that he kept two hundred 
dogs of the chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of 
prey. 

Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed 
he loved war better even than hunting, and delighted 
so much in personal feats of arms that, concealing his 
name and quality, in order that the combat should 
be in all things equal, he was wont to challenge re- 
nowned champions wherever he heard of them, and 
to meet them in the lists. Great part of his life was 
spent in the field ; and he fought in turn on nearly 
all sides of the political questions then agitating 
Italy. In 1495 he was at the head of the Venetian 
and other Italian troops when they beat the French 
under Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use 
of their victory as to let their vanquished invaders 
escape from them after all. Nevertheless, if the 
Gonzaga did not here show himself a great general, 



DUCAL MANTUA. 369 

lie did great feats of personal valor, penetrating to 
the midst of the French forces, wounding the king, 
and with his own hand taking prisoner the great 
Bastard of Bourbon. Venice paid him ten thousand 
ducats for gaining the victory, such as it was, and 
when peace was made he went to visit the French 
king at Vercelli ; and there Charles gave his guest 
a present of two magnificent horses, which the Gon- 
zaga returned yet more splendidly in kind." About 
five years later he was again at war with the French, 
and helped the Aragonese drive them out of Naples. 
In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the 
armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the 
Venetian service), and he reduced the city of Bo- 
logna to obedience to the Holy See. In 1509 he 
joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, 
being made Imperial Captain-General, was taken 
prisoner by the Venetians. They liberated him, 
however, the following year ; and in 1513 we find 
him at the head of the league against the French. 
A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitality 
is also illustrative of the anomalous life of those 
times, when good faith had as little to do with the 
intercourse of nations as at present ; but good for- 
tune, when she appeared in the world, liked to put 
on a romantic and melodramatic guise. An ambas- 
sador from the Grand Turk on his way to Rome was 
taken by an enemy of the Pope, despoiled of all his 
money, and left planted, as the Italians expressively 
say, at Ancona. This ambassador was come to 
concert with Alexander VI. the death of Bajazet's 

24 



370 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

brother, prisoner in the Pope's hands, and -he bore 
the Pope a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was 
Gian Delia Rovere who seized and spoiled him, and 
sent the papers (letters of the Pope and Sultan) to 
Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had 
been obliged to give the Grand Turk's brother. 
The magnificent Gonzaga hears of the Turk's em- 
barrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to 
Mantua, clothes him, puts abundant money in his 
purse, and dispatches him on his way. The Sultan, 
in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a 
number of fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly 
being tired of presenting his own horses, returned 
the Porte a ship-load of excellent Mantuan cheeses. 
This interchange of compliments seems to have led 
to a kind of romantic friendship between the Gon- 
zaga and the Grand Turk, who did occasionally in- 
terest himself in the affairs of the Christian dogs ; 
and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, 
actually wrote to the Serenest Senate, and asked 
his release as a personal grace to him, the Grand 
Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go ; the 
canny republic being willing to do the Sultan any 
sort of cheap favor. 

This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, 
seems to have had little time for the adornment of 
his capital. The Church of Our Lady of Victory 
is the only edifice which he added to it ; and- this 
was merely in glorification of his own triumph over 
the French at Taro. Mantegna painted an altar- 
piece for it, representing the Marquis and his wife 



DUCAL MANTUA. 371 

on their knees before the Virgin, in act of rendering 
her thanks for the victory. The French nation 
avenged itself for whatever wrong was done its 
pride in this picture by stealing it away from Man- 
tua in Napoleon's time ; and it now hangs in the 
gallery of the Louvre. 

Francesco died in 1519 ; and after him his son, 
Federico II., the first Duke of Mantua, reigned 
some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The 
marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the 
Emperor Charles V., to whom the Gonzaga had 
given efficient aid in his wars against the French. 
This was in the year 1530 ; and three years later, 
when the Duke of Monferrato died, and the inherit- 
ance of his opulent little state was disputed by the 
Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo, and by 
the Gonzaga, who had married the late Duke's 
daughter, Charles's influence secured it to the Man- 
tuan. The dominions of the Gonzagas had now 
reached their utmost extent, and these dominions 
were not curtailed till the deposition of Fernando 
Carlo in 1708, when Monferrato was adjudged, to 
the Duke of Savoy, and afterwards confirmed to 
him by treaty. It was separated from the capital 
of the Gonzagas by a wide extent of alien territory, 
but they held it with a strong hand, embellished 
the city, and founded there the strongest citadel in 
Italy. 

Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears 
to have reposed in peace for the rest of his days, 
and to have devoted himself to the adornment of 



872 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

Mantua and the aggrandizing of his family. His 
court was the home of many artists ; and Titian 
painted for him the Twelve Caesars, which the Ger- 
mans stole when they sacked the city in L680. I *>u i 
his great agent and best beloved genius was Giulio 
Pippi, called Romano, who was conducted to Man- 
tua, by pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione. 

Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione I whose in- 
comparable book of the u Cortigiano " succeeded in 
teaching Ins countrymen every gentlemanly grace 
but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Man- 

tovano, in the year L476, and went in Ins boyhood 
to be schooled at Milan, where he learnt the pro- 
fession of arms. From Milan he went to Koine, 

where he exercised his profession of anus fill the 
year L504, when he was called to gentler uses at 
the court of the elegant Dukesof Qrbino. He lived 

(here as courtier and OOUrt-poet, and he returned to 

Rome as the ambassador from Urbino. Meantime 
his liege, Francesoo Gonzaga, was but poorly 
pleased that so brilliant a, Mantuan should spend 

his life in the service and Ornament of other princes, 

and Castiglione came back to his native country 

about the year L516. He married in Manilla,, and 
there finished his famous book of " 'The Courtier," 
and succeeded in winning back the favor («f his 

prince. Federico, the Duke, made him ambassador 
to Rome in L528 ; and Baldassare did his master 

tWO signal services (here, — he procured him lobe 
named head of all the Papal forces, and he found 

him Giulio Romano. So the Duke suffered him to 



DUCAL MANTUA. 878 

go as the Pope's Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare 
finished his courtly days at Toledo in 1529. 

The poet made a dolour fco Mantua, on Ins way to 

Spain, taking with him the painter, whom the Duke 
received with many caresses, as Vasari says, pre- 
sented him a house honorably Furnished, ordered 

provision for him and his pupils, gave them certain 
brave suits of velvet and satin, and, seeing that 
Oiulio had no horse, called for his own favorite 

Luggieri, and bestowed it on him. Ah! they knew 

how to receive painters, those line princes, who had 
merely to put, their hands into their people's pocket, 

and take out what llorins they liked. So the Duke 

presently set- the artist to work, riding out with him 

through the gate Of San BastianO to some stables 
about a bow-shot from the walls, in the midst of a 
Hal meadow, where he told Oiulio that, be would be 
glad (if it could be done without destroying the old 

Walls) to have such buildings added to the stables 
as would serve him for a, kind of Lodge, to come out, 
and merrily sup in when he liked. Whereupon 

Giuiio began to think- out the Famous Palazzo del T. 

This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom 

all criticism seems to have agreed to attribute great 
power and deny great praise. Castiglione had 

found him at Rome, after the death of his master 

Raphael, when his genius, Tor good or For ill, began 
for the first time to find original expression. A't 

Mantua,, where he spent, all the rest of his busy lib', 
it is impossible not to feel in some degree the foree 
of this genius. As in Venice all the Madonnas in 



374 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

the street-corner shrines have some touch of color 
to confess the painter's subjection to Titian or Tin- 
toretto ; as in Vicenza the edifices are all in Greek- 
ish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in honor and 
homage to Palladio ; as in Parma Correggio has 
never died, but lives to this day in the mouths and 
chiaroscuro effects of all the figures in all the pic- 
tures painted there ; — so in Mantua Giulio Romano 
is to be found in the lines of every painting and 
every palace. It is wonderful to see, in these little 
Italian cities which have been the homes of great 
men, how no succeeding generation has dared to 
wrong the memory of them by departing in the 
least from their precepts upon art. One fancies, for 
instance, the immense scorn with which the Vicen- 
tines would greet the audacity of any young archi- 
tect who dared to think Gothic instead of Palladian 
Greek, and how they would put him to shame by 
asking him if he knew more than Palladio about 
architecture ! It seems that original art cannot 
arise in the presence of the great virtues and the 
great errors of the past ; and Italian art of this day 
seems incapable of even the feeble, mortal life of 
other modern art, in the midst of so much immor- 
tality. 

Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the 
Dukes of Mantua, — from painting the most deli- 
cate and improper little fresco for a bed-chamber, 
to restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense 
dikes, restoring ancient edifices and building new 
ones, draining swamps and demolishing and re- 



DUCAL MANTUA. 375 

constructing whole streets, painting palaces and 
churches, and designing the city slaughter-house. 
He grew old and very rich in the service of the 
Gonzagas ; but though Mrs. Jameson says he com- 
manded respect by a sense of his own dignity as an 
artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the " Annali 
di Mantova," says that the want of nobility and 
purity in his style, and his " gallant inventions, 
were conformable to his own sensual life, and that 
he did not disdain to prostitute himself to the infa- 
mies of Aretino." 

His great architectural work in Mantua is the 
Palazzo del T, or T£, as it is now written. It was 
first called Palazzo del T, from the convergence of 
roads there in the form of that letter ; and the mod- 
ern Mantuans call it Del Te, from the superstition, 
transmitted to us by the Custode of the Ducal Pal- 
ace, that the Gonzagas merely used it on pleasant 
afternoons to take tea in ! so curiously has latter- 
day guidemanship interpreted the jolly purpose 
expressed by the Duke to Giulio. I say nothing 
to control the reader's choice between T and Te, 
and merely adhere to the elder style out of rever- 
ence for the past. It is certain that the air of the 
plain on which the palace stands is most unwhole- 
some, and it may have been true that the dukes 
never passed the night there. Federico did not 
intend to build more than a lodge in this place ; 
but fascinated with the design offered him by Giu- 
lio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him 
a palace instead. It stands, as Vasari says, about 



37(3 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

a good bow-shot from one of the city's gates ; and 
going out to see the palace on our second day in 
Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Aus- 
trian soldiers. Below languished a bed of sullen 
ooze, tangled and thickly grown with long, villa- 
nous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly 
stench, which made all the faces we saw look fever- 
ish and sallow. Already at that early season the 
air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making 
himself seen through the dun sky of the dull spring 
day, seemed sick to look upon the place, where 
indeed the only happy and lively things were the 
clouds of gnats that danced before us, and wel- 
comed us to the Palazzo del T. Damp ditches sur- 
round the palace, in which these gnats seemed to 
have peculiar pleasure ; and they took possession 
of the portico of the stately entrance of the edifice 
as we went in, and held it faithfully till we re- 
turned. 

In one of the first large rooms are the life-size 
portraits of the six finest horses of the Gonzaga 
stud, painted by the pupils of Giulio Romano, after 
the master's designs. The paintings attest the 
beauty of the Mantuan horses, and the pride and 
fondness of their ducal owners ; and trustworthy 
critics have praised their eminent truih. But it is 
only the artist or the hippanthrop who^can delight 
in them long ; and we presently left them for the 
other chambers, in which the invention of Giulio 
had been used to please himself rather than his 
master. I scarcely mean to name the wonders* of 



DUCAL MANTUA. 377 

the palace, having, indeed, general associations with 
them, rather than particular recollections of them. 

One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber 
of Psyche (the apartments are not of great size), 
of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the walls are 
by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every 
variety of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, 
as told by Apuleius, and deserves to be curiously 
studied as a part of the fair outside of a superb and 
corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rotten- 
ness. The civilization of Italy, as a growth from 
the earliest Pagan times, and only modified by 
Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood 
and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed ; and 
until this analysis is made, discussion of certain 
features must necessarily be incomplete and unsat- 
isfactory. No one, however, can stand in this 
Chamber of Psyche, and not feel how great reality 
the old mythology must still have had, not only 
for the artists who painted the room, but for the 
people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not 
say that they believed it as they believed in the 
vital articles of Christian faith, but that they ac- 
cepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the 
martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine 
gentlemen and ladies of the court, those jolly satyrs 
and careless nymphs, those Cupids and Psyches, 
and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity 
as the Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the 
great body of the saints. If they did not pray to 
them, they swore by them, and their names were 



618 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

much oftener on their lips ; and the art of the time 
was so thoroughly Pagan, that it forgot all Christian 
holiness, and clung only to heathen beauty. When 
it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal with, 
it paganized Christian themes. St. Sebastian was 
made to look like Apollo, and Mary Magdalene was 
merely a tearful, triste Venus. There is scarcely a 
ray of feeling in Italian art since Raphael's time 
which suggests Christianity in the artist, or teaches 
it to the beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects it 
was happiest, as in the life of Psyche, in this room ; 
and here it inculcated a gay and spirited license, 
and an elegant absence of delicacy, which is still ob- 
servable in Italian life. It would be instructive to 
know in what spirit the common Mantuans of his 
day looked upon the inventions of the painter, and 
how far the courtly circle which frequented this room 
went in discussion and comment on its subjects ; 
they were not nice people, and probably had no 
nasty ideas about the unspeakable indecency of some 
of the scenes. 1 

Returning to the city we visited the house of Giu- 
lio Romano, which stands in one of the fine, lone- 
some streets, and at the outside of which we looked. 
The artist designed it himself ; and it is very pretty, 

1 T> c ruin in the famous room frescoed with the Fall of the Giants 
commences on the very door-jambs, which are painted in broken and 
tumbling brick-work ; and throughout there is a prodigiousness which 
does not surprise, and a bigness which does not impress ; and the treat- 
ment of the subject can only be expressed by the Westernism pow- 
erfully weak. In Kugler's Hand-book of Italian Painting are two 
illustrations, representing parts of the fresco, which give a fair idea of 
the \ 'hole. 



DUCAL MANTUA. 379 

with delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamen- 
tation, but is not otherwise interesting. 

We passed it, continuing our way toward the 
Arsenal, near which we had seen the women at work 
washing the linen coats of the garrison in the twilight 
of the evening before ; and we now saw them again 
from the bridge, on which we paused to look at a 
picturesque bit of modern life in Mantua. The 
washing-machine (when the successful instrument 
is invented) may do its work as well, but not so 
charmingly, as these Mantuan girls did. They 
washed the linen in a clear, swift^running stream, 
diverted from the dam of the Mincio to furnish mill- 
power within the city wall ; and we could look down 
the watercourse past old arcades of masonry half 
submerged in it, past pleasant angles of houses and 
a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly, slowly, till our view 
ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through 
the columns of which was seen the blue sky. Under 
the bridge the stream ran very strong and lucid, 
over long, green, undulating water-grasses, which it 
loved to dimple over and play with. On the right 
were the laundresses under the eaves of a wooden 
shed, each kneeling, as their custom is, in a three- 
sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard 
that sloped down into the water. As they washed 
they held the linen in one hand, and rubbed it with 
the other ; then heaped it into a mass upon the 
board and beat it with great two-handed blows of a 
stick. They sang, meanwhile, one of those plain- 
tive airs of which the Italian peasants are fond, and 



380 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing with their 
blows, and rhythmic with the graceful movement of 
their forms. Many of the women were young, — 
though they were of all ages, — and the prettiest 
among them was third from where we stood upon 
the bridge. She caught sight of the sketch-book 
which pne of the travellers carried, and pointed it 
out to the rest, who could hardly settle to their work 
to be sketched. Presently an idle baker, whose shop 
adjoined the bridge, came out and leaned upon the 
parapet, and bantered the girls. " They are draw- 
ing the prettiest;" he said, at which they all bridled 
a little ; and she who knew herself to be prettiest 
hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen. 
Long before the artist had finished the sketch, the 
lazy, good-humored crowd which the public prac- 
tice of the fine arts always attract in Italy, had sur- 
rounded the strangers, and were applauding, com- 
menting, comparing, and absorbing every stroke as 
it was made. When the book was closed and they 
walked away, a number of boys straggled after 
them some spaces, inspired by a curious longing and 
regret, like that which leads boys to the eager in- 
spection of fireworks when they have gone out. We 
lost them at the first turning of the street, whither 
the melancholy chorus of the women's song had also 
followed us, and where it died pathetically away. 
In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgil- 
iana, the beautiful space laid out and planted with 
trees by the French, at the beginning of this century, 
in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of its 



DUCAL MANTUA. 381 

bounds is the shore of the lake which surrounds the 
city, and from which now rose ghostly vapors on the 
still twilight air. Down the slow, dull current 
moved one of the picturesque black boats of the Po ; 
and beyond, the level landscape had a pleasant des- 
olation that recalled the scenery of the Middle Mis- 
sissippi. It might have been here in this very water 
that the first-born of our first Duke of Mantua fell 
from his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550, and 
took a fever of which he died only a short time after 
his accession to the sovereignty of the duchy. At 
any rate, the fact of the accident brings me back 
from lounging up and down Mantua to my grave 
duty of chronicler. Francesco's father had left him 
in childhood to the care of his uncle, the Cardinal 
Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able 
hand, increasing the income of the state, spending 
less upon the ducal stud, and cutting down the 
number of mouths at the ducal table from eight 
hundred to three hundred and fifty-one. His justice 
tended to severity rather than mercy ; but reformers 
of our own time will argue well of his heart, that he 
founded in that time a place of refuge and retirement 
for abandoned women. Good Catholics Avill also be 
pleased to know that he was very efficient in sup- 
pressing the black heresy of Calvin, which had crept 
into Mantua in his day, — probably from Ferrara, 
where the black heretic himself was then, or about 
then, in hiding under the protection of the ill-advised 
Marchioness Ren^e. The good Cardinal received 
the Pope's applause for his energy in this matter, 



382 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the Calvin- 
ists. Of the Duke who died so young, the Vene- 
tian ambassador thought it worth while to write 
what I think it worth while to quote, as illustrating 
the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge 
of its neighbors : " He is a boy of melancholy com- 
plexion. His eyes are full of spirit, but he does not 
delight in childish things, and seems secretly proud 
of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and 
shows much inclination for letters.'' 

His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 
1550. seems to have had the same affection for 
learning ; but he was willful, harsh, and cruelly am- 
bitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing 
so much as perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas 
hi Mantua. He was a hunchback, and some of his 
family (who could not have understood his charac- 
ter) tried to persuade him not to assume the ducal 
dignity : but his haughty temper soon righted him 
in their esteem, and it is said that all the courtiers 
put on humps in honor of the Duke. He was not a 
great warrior, and there are few picturesque inci- 
dents in his reign. Indeed, nearly the last of these 
in Mantuan history was the coronation at Mantua 
of the excellent poet Lodoyico Ariosto. by Charles 
V., in 1532. Federico II. reigning. But the Maii- 
tuans of Guglielmo* s day were not without their 
sensations, for three Japanese ambassadors passed 
through their city on the way to Rome. They were 
also awakened to religious zeal by the reappearance 
of Protestantism among them. The heresy was 



DUCAL MANTUA. 883 

happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting under 
Pius V., though with small thanks to Duke Wil- 
liam, who seems to have taken no fervent part in 
the persecutions. " The proceedings," says Cantii, 
writing before slavery had been abolished, " were 
marked by those punishments which free America 
inflicts upon the negroes to-day, and which a high 
conception of the mission of the Church moves us 
to deplore." The Duke must have made haste after 
this to reconcile himself with the Church ; for we 
read that two years later he was permitted to take 
a particle of the blood of Christ from the church of 
St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara, where he de- 
posited it in a box of crystal and gold, and caused 
his statue to be placed before the shrine in the act 
of adoring the relic. 

Duke William managed his finances so well as to 
leave his spendthrift son Vincenzo a large sum of 
money to make away with after his death. Part of 
this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his 
father's wishes in the article of matrimony. The 
prince was in love with the niece of the Duke of 
Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born enough, 
but having unhappily only sixty thousand crowns to 
her portion. So she was not to be thought of, and 
Vincenzo married the sister of the Duke of Parma, 
of whom he grew so fond, that, though two years of 
marriage brought them no children, he could scarce 
be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of 
sterility. This happened, however, and the prince's 
affections were next engaged by the daughter of the 



384 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion 
of three hundred thousand crowns, which entirely 
charmed the frugal-minded Duke William, and 
Vincenzo married her, after certain diplomatic pre- 
liminaries demanded by the circumstances, which 
scarcely bear statement in English, and which the 
present history would blush to give even in Italian. 

Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vin- 
cenzo, both by his own fault and that of others ; 
but it ought to be remembered of him, that at his 
solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liber- 
ated from durance in the hospital of St. Anna his 
poet Tasso, whom he had kept shut in that mad- 
house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed 
his " Discorso " to Vincenzo's kinsman, the learned 
Cardinal Scipio Gonzaga ; and to this prelate he 
submitted for correction the " Gerusalemme," as 
did Guarini his " Pastor Fido." 

When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat 
treasury, which he enjoyed after the fashion of the 
time, and which, having a princely passion for every 
costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned 
in 1587 ; and on his coronation day rode through 
the streets throwing gold to the people, after the 
manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an 
army of six thousand men, among a population of 
eighty thousand all told ; and maintained as his 
guard " fifty archers on horseback, who also served 
with the arquebuse, and fifty light-horsemen for the 
guard of his own person, who were all excellently 
mounted, the Duke possessing such a noble stud of 



DUCAL MANTUA. 385 

horses that he always had five hundred at his ser- 
vice, and kept in stable one hundred and fifty of 
marvelous beauty." He lent the Spanish king two 
hundred thousand pounds out of his father's spar- 
ings ; and when the Archduchess of Austria, Mar- 
gherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed 
Philip II. of Spain, he gave her a diamond ring 
worth twelve thousand crowns. Next after women, 
he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent im- 
mense sums for actors. He would not, indeed, cede 
in splendor to the greatest monarchs, and in his 
reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty million 
crowns ! No one will be surprised to learn from a 
contemporary writer in Mantua, that this excellent 
prince was adorned with all the Christian virtues ; 
nor to be told by a later historian, that in Vin- 
cenzo's time Mantua was the most corrupt city in 
Europe. A satire of the year 1601, which this 
writer (Maffei) reduces to prose, says of that pe- 
riod : "Everywhere in Mantua are seen feasts, 
jousts, masks, banquets, plays, music, balls, delights, 
dancing. To these, the young girls," an enormity 
in Italy, " as well as the matrons, go in magnificent 
dresses ; and even the churches are scenes of love- 
making. Good mothers, instead of teaching their 
daughters the use of the needle, teach them the arts 
of rouging, dressing, singing, and dancing. Naples 
and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India 
and Peru gold and gems enough, to deck out female 
impudence and pride. Courtiers and warriors per- 
fume themselves as delicately as ladies ; and even 

25 



386 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

the food is scented, that the mouth may exhale fra- 
grance. The galleries and halls of the houses are 
painted full of the loves of Mars and Venus, Leda 
and the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the devout 
solace themselves with such sacred subjects as Su- 
sannah and the Elders. The flower of chastity 
seems withered in Mantua. No longer in Lydia 
nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is fixed the realm 
of pleasure." The Mantuans were a different peo- 
ple in the old republican times, when a fine was 
imposed for blasphemy, and the blasphemer put into 
a basket and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay 
within fifteen days ; which must have made profan- 
ity a luxury even to the rich. But in that day a 
man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents) 
if he spoke to a woman in church ; and women 
were not allowed even the moderate diversion of 
going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace about 
the neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than 
a yard, nor crowns of pearls or gems, nor belts 
worth more than ten livres (twenty-five dollars), 
nor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty 
cents.) 

Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought 
into the world with Vincenzo, there was another 
Gonzaga born about the same period, who became 
in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to 
this day one of the most powerful friends of virtue 
to whom a good Catholic can pray. He is par- 
ticularly recommended by his biographer, the Je- 
suit Father Cesari, in cases of carnal temptation ; 



DUCAL MANTUA. 387 

and improving stories are told Italian youth of the 
miracles he works under such circumstances. He 
vowed chastity for his own part at an age when 
most children do not know good from evil, and he 
carried the fulfillment of this vow to such extreme, 
that, being one day at play of forfeits with other 
boys and girls, and being required to kiss — not 
one of the little maidens — but her shadow oil the 
wall, he would not, preferring to lose his pawn. 
Everybody, I think, will agree with Father Cesari 
that it would be hard to draw chastity finer than 
this. 

San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that Ridolfo 
who put his wife to death, and his father was Mar- 
quis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was born in 
1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the mar- 
quisate ; but from his earliest years he had a call to 
the Church. His family did everything possible to 
dissuade him — his father with harshness, and his 
uncle, Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness — - 
from his vocation. The latter even sent a " bishop 
of rare eloquence " to labor with the boy at Castig- 
lione ; but everything was done in vain. In due 
time Luigi joined the Company of Jesus, renounced 
this world, and died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, 
after doing such good works as surprised every one. 
His brother Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate, 
and fell into a quarrel with Duke William about 
lands, which dispute Luigi composed before his 
death. About all which the reverend Jesuit Father 
Tolomei has shown how far heaviness can go in the 



388 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

dramatic form, and lias written a pitiless play, 
wherein everybody goes into a convent with the fall 
of the curtain. Till the reader has read this play, 
he has never (properly speaking) been bored. For 
the happiness of mankind, it has not been translated 
out of the original Italian. 

From the time of the first Vincenzo's death, there 
are only two tragic events which lift the character 
of Mantuan history above the quality of chronique 
scandaleuse, namely, the Duke Ferdinand's repudia- 
tion of Camilla Faa di Casale, and the sack of Man- 
tua in 1630. The first of these events followed 
close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo ; for 
his son Francesco reigned but a short time, and 
died, leaving a little daughter of three years to the 
guardianship of her uncle, the Cardinal Ferdinand. 
The law of the Mantuan succession excluded fe- 
males ; and Ferdinand, dispensed from his ecclesi- 
astical functions by the Pope, ascended the ducal 
throne. In 1615, not long after his accession, as 
the chronicles relate, in passing through a chamber 
of the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a 
cithern, and being himself young, and of the ardent 
temper of the Gonzagas, he fell in love with the fair 
minstrel. She was the daughter of a noble servant 
of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to 
the court of the Duke of Savoy, and was called 
Count Ardizzo Faa Monf errino di Casale ; but his 
Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt 
corrupting her ; indeed, a courtly father of that day 
might Avell be supposed to have feAV scruples that 



DUCAL MANTUA. 389 

would interfere with a gracious sovereign's designs 
upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity 
of Camilla was so well guarded that the ex-cardinal 
was at last forced to propose marriage. It seems 
that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer ; and be- 
sides, the ducal crown, was a glittering temptation, 
and she consented to a marriage which, for state and 
family reasons, was made secret. When the fact 
was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule of 
Ferdinand's family, and the Duke's sister Margaret, 
Duchess of Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain of his 
mesalliance with an inferior, that she drove him to 
desperation with her sarcasms. About this time 
Camilla's father died, with strong evidences of poi- 
soning ; and the wife being left helpless and friend- 
less, her noble husband resorted to the artifice of 
feigning that there had never been any marriage, 
and thus sought to appease his family. Unhappily, 
however, he had given her a certificate of matri- 
mony, which she refused to surrender when he put 
her away, so that the Duke, desiring afterwards to 
espouse the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, 
was obliged to present a counterfeit certificate to his 
bride, who believed it the real marriage contract, 
and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered 
the imposition, she would not rest till she had 
wrung the real document from Camilla, under the 
threat of putting her son to death. The miserable 
mother then retired to a convent, and died of a bro- 
ken heart, while Ferdinand bastardized his only, 
legitimate son, a noble boy, whom his mother had 



390 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

prettily called Jacinth. After this, a kind of retri- 
bution, amid all his political successes, seems to 
have pursued the guilty Duke. His second wife 
was too fat to bear children, but not to bear malice ; 
and she never ceased to distrust and reproach the 
Duke, whom she could not believe in anything since 
the affair of the counterfeit marriage contract. She 
was very religious, and embittered Ferdinand's days 
with continued sermons and reproofs, and made him 
order, in the merry Mantuan court, all the devotions 
commanded by her confessor. 

So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in 
sore remorse, and was succeeded in 1626 by his 
brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith and 
light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one 
year, and was ignoble as it was brief, and fitly ended 
the direct line of the Gonzagas. Vincenzo, though 
an ecclesiastic, never studied anything, and was dis- 
gracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love 
of letters, he had not the warlike boldness of his 
race ; and resembled his ancestors only in the love 
he bore to horses, hunting, and women. He was 
enamored of the widow of one of his kinsmen, a 
woman no longer young, but of still agreeable per- 
son, strong will, and quick wit, and of a fascinating 
presence, which Vincenzo could not resist. The 
excellent prince was wooing her, with a view to se- 
duction, when he received the nomination of car- 
dinal from Pope Paul V. He pressed his suit, but 
the lady would consent to nothing but marriage, 
and Vincenzo bundled up the cardinal's purple and 



DUCAL MANTUA. 391 

sent it back, with a very careless and ill-mannered 
letter to the ireful Pope, who swore never to make 
another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the 
widow, but soon wearied of her, and spent the rest 
of his days in vain attempts to secure a divorce, in 
order to be restored to his ecclesiastical benefices. 
And one Christmas morning he died childless ; and 
three years later the famous sack of Mantua took 
place. The events leading to this crime are part of 
one of the most complicated episodes of Italian his- 
tory. 

Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother's daughter 
Maria, claimed the Duchy of Monferrato as part of 
his dominion ; but his claim was disputed by Maria's 
grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that 
it reverted to him, on the death of his daughter, as 
a fief which had been added to Mantua merely by 
the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with his family. 
He was supported in this claim by the Spaniards, 
then at Milan. The Venetians and the German 
Emperor supported Ferdinand, and the French ad- 
vanced the claim of a third, a descendant of Lodo- 
vico Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a century before, 
and entered upon the inheritance of the Duchy of 
Nevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one of the 
boldest of his warlike race; and the Italians had 
great hopes of him as one great enough to drive 
the barbarians out of Italy. But nearly three cen- 
turies more were wanted to raise his family to the 
magnitude of a national purpose ; and Carlo Eman- 
uel spent his greatness in disputes with the petty 



892 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

princes about him. In this dispute for Monferrato 
he was worsted ; for at the treaty of Pavia, Mon- 
ferrato was assured to Duke Ferdinand of Mantua. 

Ferdinand afterwards died without issue, and 
Vincenzo likewise died childless ; and Charles Gon- 
zaga of Nevers-Rethel, who had married Maria, 
Ferdinand's ward, became heir to the Duchy of 
Mantua, but his right was disputed by Ferrante 
Gonzaga of Guastalla. Charles hurriedly and half 
secretly introduced himself into Mantua without 
consultation with Venetian, Spaniard, or German. 
While Duke Olivares of Spain was meditating his 
recognition, his officer at Milan tried to seize Man- 
tua and failed ; but the German Emperor had been 
even more deeply offended, and claimed the remis- 
sion of Charles's rights as a feudatory of the Roman 
Empire, until he should have regularly invested him. 
Charles prepared for defense. Meanwhile Spain 
and Savoy seized Monferrato, but they were after- 
wards defeated by the French, and the Spanish 
Milanese was overrun by the Venetians and Man- 
tuans. The German Emperor then sent down his 
Landsknechts, and in 1630 besieged Mantua, while 
the French promised help and gave none, and the 
Pope exhorted Charles to submit. The Venetians, 
occupied with the Uskok pirates, could do little in 
his defense. To the horrors of this unequal and 
desperate war were added those of famine ; and the 
Jews, passing between the camp and the city, 
brought a pest from the army into Mantua, which 
raged with extraordinary violence among the hun- 



DUCAL MANTUA. 393 

gry and miserable people. In vain they formed 
processions, and carried the blood of Christ about 
the city. So many died that there were not boats 
enough to bear them away to their sepulture in the 
lakes, and the bodies rotted in the streets. There 
was not wanting at this time the presence of a 
traitor in the devoted city ; and that this wretch 
was a Swiss will be a matter of no surprise. The 
despicable valor of these republicans has everywhere 
formed the best defense of tyrants, and their fidelity 
has always been at the service of the highest bidder. 
The recreant was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guard 
of the Duke ; and when he had led the Germans 
into Mantua, and received the reward of his in- 
famy, two German soldiers, placed over him for his 
protection, killed him and plundered him of his 
spoil. 

The sack now began, and lasted three days, with 
unspeakable horrors. The Germans (then the most 
slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated Mantuan 
women, and buried their victims alive. The har- 
lots of their camp cast off their rags, and robing 
themselves in the richest spoils they could find, 
rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and 
added the shame of drunken orgies to the dreadful 
scene of blood and tears. The Jews were driven 
forth almost naked from the Ghetto. The precious 
monuments of ages were destroyed ; or such as the 
fury of the soldiers spared, the avarice of their gen- 
erals consumed; and pictures, statues, and other 
works of art were stolen and carried away. The 



394 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

churches were plundered, the sacred houses of relig- 
ion were sacked, and the nuns who did not meet a 
worse, fate went begging through the streets. 

The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immedi- 
ately upon entering the city, appropriated the Du- 
cal Palace to himself as his share of the booty. He 
placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at 
leisure and systematically, and gained fabulous sums 
from the robbery. After the sack was ended, 
he levied upon the population (from whom his sol- 
diers had forced everything that terror and torture 
could wring from them) four contributions, amount- 
ing to a hundred thousand doubloons. This popu- 
lation had, during the siege and sack, been reduced 
from thirty to twelve thousand; and Aldringher 
had so thoroughly accomplished his part of the 
spoliation, that the Duke Charles, returning after 
the withdrawal of the Germans, could not find in 
the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit upon. 
He and his family had fled half naked from their 
beds on the entry of the Germans, and, after a 
pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to Ariano, 
whence the Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna' to 
expose his miserable fate to the Emperor. The 
conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the 
capital ; and the Empress sent Carlo's wife ten 
thousand zecchini, with which they returned at 
length to Mantua. It is melancholy to read how 
his neighbors had to compassionate his destitution : 
how the Grand Duke of Tuscany sent him uphol- 
stery for two state chambers ; how the Duke of 



DUCAL MANTUA. 395 

Parma supplied his table-service ; how Alfonso of 
Modena gave him a hundred pairs of oxen, and as 
many peasants to till his desolated lands. His peo- 
ple always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the 
cause of their woes ; and after a reign of ten years 
he died of a broken heart, or, as some thought, of 
poison. 

Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew 
and namesake, who succeeded to the throne ten 
years after his uncle's death, the princess Maria 
Gonzaga being regent during his minority. Carlo 
II. early manifested the amorous disposition of his 
blood, but his reign was not distinguished by re- 
markable events. He was of imperial politics dur- 
ing those interminable French-Austrian wars, and 
the French desolated his dominions more or less. 
In the time of this Carlo II., we read of the Jews 
being condemned to pay the wages of the Duke's 
archers for the extremely improbable crime of kill- 
ing some Hebrews who had been converted ; and 
there is account of the Duchess going on foot to the 
sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace, to render thanks 
for her son's recovery from a fever, and her daugh- 
ter's recovery from the bite of a monkey. Mantua 
must also have regained something of its former 
gayety ; for in 1652 the Austrian Archdukes and 
the Medici spent Carnival there. Carlo II. died, 
like his father, with suspicions of poisoning, and un- 
doubted evidences of debauchery. He was a gener- 
ous and amiable prince ; and, though a shameless 
profligate, was beloved by his subjects, with whom, 
no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach. 



396 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 
1665 to 1708, was the last and basest of his race. 
The histories of his country do not attribute a sin- 
gle virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to 
have united in himself all the vices of all the Gon- 
zagas. He was licentious and depraved as the first 
Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo's courage ; he 
was luxurious as the second Francesco, but had 
none of his generosity ; he taxed his people heavily 
that he might meanly enjoy their substance without 
making them even the poor return of national glory ; 
he was grasping as Guglielmo, but saved nothing to 
the state ; he was as timid as the second Vincenzo, 
and yet made a feint of making war, and went to 
Hungary at one time to fight against the Turk. But 
he loved far better to go to Venice in his gilded 
barge, and to spend his Carnivals amid the infinite 
variety of that city's dissoluteness. He was so igno- 
rant as scarcely to be able to write his name ; but 
he knew all vicious things from his cradle, as if , in- 
deed, he had been gifted to know them by instinct 
through the profligacy of his parents. It is said 
that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be 
ruled by so dull and ignorant a wretch ; but in 
his time, nevertheless, Mantua was all rejoicings, 
promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. 
"The Duke recruited women from every country 
to stock his palace," says an Italian author, " where 
they played, sang, and made merry at his will and 
theirs." " In Venice," says Volta, " he surren- 
dered himself to such diversions without shame, or 



DUCAL MANTUA. 397 

stint of expense. He not only took part in all pub- 
lic entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but 
he held a most luxurious and gallant court of his 
own ; and all night long his palace was the scene of 
theatrical representations by dissolute women, with 
music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name 
than Sardanapalus of old." He sneaked away to 
these gross delights in 1700, while the Emperor was 
at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess (a 
brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante 
Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla) to take care of the 
duchy, then in great part 'occupied by Spanish and 
French forces. This was the War of the Spanish 
Succession; and it used up poor Ferdinand, who 
had not a shadow of interest in it. He had sold 
the fortress of Casale to the French in 1681, feign- 
ing that they had taken it from him by fraud ; and 
now he declared that he was forced to admit eight 
thousand French and Spanish troops into Mantua. 
Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never.: 
would believe it ; and he pronounced Ferdinand 
guilty of felony against the Empire, and deposed 
him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against 
this sentence to the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending 
the Diet's decision, made a journey of pleasure to 
France, where the Grand Monarch named him gen- 
eralissimo of the French forces in Italy, though he 
never commanded them. He came back to Mantua 
after a little, and built himself a splendid theatre, — 
the cheerful Duke. 

But his end was near. The French and A us- 



398 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 

trians made peace in 1707 ; and next year, Monfer 
rato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered 
Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The 
Austrians marched into Mantua on the 29th of Feb 
ruary, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand camu 
back no more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of 
restoration held out to him by Venice and France, 
he died on the 5th of the July following, at Padua, 
— it was said by poison, but more . probably of sin 
and sorrow. So ended Ducal Mantua. 

The Austrians held the city till 1797. The 
French Revolution took it and kept it till 1799, and 
then left it to the Austrians for two years. Then 
the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802 ; and 
then it was made part of the Kingdom of Italy, and 
so continued twelve years ; after which it fell again 
to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution, and 
the Austrian soldiers stole the precious silver case 
that held the phial of the true blood. Now at last, 
it belongs to the Kingdom of Italy, with the other 
forts of the Quadrilateral — thanks to the Prussian 
needle-gun. . 










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